Often called “evening prayer,” vespers is held around sunset. Its purpose: to give thanks for the day and offer a sacrifice of praise to God. In Jane Lewty’s Vespers, she superimposes the tropes of the Christian ritual onto a very different type of sacrifice—that of making art.
Through nightly devotion, the speaker of these poems maps ritual until it degrades: the speaker as an obedient robot, a scribe-concubine, a centaur wearing skates, a poet seeking virtuosity and dexterity. Vespers asks: What if writing prompts are a bad idea? What if one could become addicted to the incremental process? Is it possible to walk away from an addiction without suffering and trauma?
“Jane Lewty transforms the ancient ritual of evening prayer into a searching, contemporary art of attention. Through antiphons, hymns, and restless meditations, she threads together city light and basilica shadow, art history and automatons, dread and devotion, asking what it means to persist. These poems are intellectually agile and lyrically electric. Radiant, restless, and formally daring, Vespers makes twilight an aperture where language itself becomes a form of necessary vigil.”—Peter Gizzi, author, Fierce Elegy
“This masterful project unfolds as a series of poetic, investigative responses to algorithmic commands orbiting around liturgical, calendrical, devotional, and sexual practice. Jane Lewty builds with fine-tuned language a phenomenological, conceptual world in which her two directives—to ‘be an elaborate robot. be a full-blooded body’—are not in opposition, and in their poetic conjoining reach for something tethered to the divine, but anchored here, in each particulate, noticed instant.”—Cody-Rose Clevidence, author, This Household of Earthly Nature
