WHAT HAVE I TO SAY TO YOU
“In Karl Shapiro’s best book, The Bourgeois Poet (1964), there’s an excellent poem to Randall Jarrell. The last line of that poem goes, “I rush to read you, whatever you print.” That’s how I feel about Megan Levad. That’s how I feel, and that’s what I do.” -Anthony Madrid, The Paris Review
“Levad’s epistolary accumulations are intriguing, and move from confrontation to meditation, interior monologue to direct speech. The ‘you’ of her title, in a certain way, becomes superfluous, or at least secondary, making the remainder of her title a question she works with great attention and detail to answer…a kind of intricate, lyric character study composed as monologue.” -rob mclennan, rob mclennan’s blog
“We all partake in these generalizations, of course, and Levad’s poetry is an elegant depiction of this exchange of ideas between writer and reader, each forming a vision of the world from the other. But Levad also emphasizes the confusion brought about by this exchange, a confusion clearly expressed in the question “Am I going to die?” -Andrew Hungate, Literary Matters
“This is a voice that would tell a lover only the harsh skinny about itself and the most terrible truth, not about our fascination with the selfie, but instead the polaroid. This is a smart love of everyone and nearly everything and it graciously leaves behind unforgettable minimal/maximal artifacts that are vivid songs, alive and formal. What a wonderful human accomplishment this book is.” -Norman Dubie
WHY WE LIVE IN THE DARK AGES
“Levad’s debut poetry collection is exquisite. The text is a cycle of unearthing the memories of what a human is and what a human does...If Hawking is correct and erasure is coming, by our own hands, then these poems will transcend our consciousness to reflect speech and bookmark our bodies in time.” -Heather Goodrich, Bombay Gin
“Why We Live in the Dark Ages is an odd, darkly funny, very smart collection of what aren't quite poems, but extended tangents...” -Megan Burbank, Portland Mercury
“…a bunch of thoroughly droll and inventive prose pieces, wherein she set out to explain (reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly) various complex processes and ideas—without doing a dot of research.” -Anthony Madrid, The Paris Review
“The speaker, though who is the speaker, anyway there’s definitely a speaker because these poems have a really oral quality to them, oral as in spoken, not as in sex. And I say she because I assume she’s a she because Megan Levad is a she which you're not supposed to do. She’s a brilliant poet and I would read her book. I did. I mean I would if I were you, out loud. Read it.” -Evie Shockley
“Megan Levad is bringing us strange news from our own planet in these pieces…Why We Live in the Dark Ages is suffused with tenderness and savage insight… Levad reminds us what poetry is for by being a poet of extraordinarily elastic range, pushing at the art to make it do what it hasn't done before.” -Laura Kasischke