ABOUT THE BOOK

2014 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series Selection

Why We Live in the Dark Ages considers how information about science and history is transmitted through language, rather than empirical experience—and how successful that transmission often is, despite its flaws. The poems digress, at points interrupt themselves, then continue. Levad holds her poems up to us as a mirror, gently showing us absurdity, helplessness and humor in the human condition. These poems are not meta or worried where they might fit into the canon. Levad doesn’t employ the usual poetic arsenal, although at its heart this book wonders and ruminates over the magic of language—not how we craft our stories for the page, but how we actually tell them.

"Megan Levad is bringing us strange news from our own planet in these pieces—news we would have missed if it weren't for her keen eye, its otherworldly gaze, and her wild poetic senses of humor and horror. Why We Live in the Dark Ages is suffused with tenderness and savage insight, and although a violent red thread runs through it, there's hope here, too. This work announces Levad as an important new voice, an inventor of both musical and discursive forms, and a poet we've needed, whose work might change us and save us, or at least make us reconsider all we've taken for granted. 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

REVIEWS

Review of Megan Levad’s Why We Live in the Dark Ages, by Ariana Nadia Nash (The Bind)

That Got Dark Fast, by Megan Burbank (Portland Mercury)

ABOUT MEGAN LEVAD

Megan Levad's poems have appeared in Tin House, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Mantis, the Everyman’s Library anthology Killer Verse, and London art and fashion magazine AnOther. She also writes lyrics for composers Tucker Fuller and Kristin Kuster. A native of rural Iowa, Megan lives in Ann Arbor, where she is the Assistant Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.

102 pages | 5.5 x 7.5 in.
ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-41-3 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-42-0 (hardcover)