Often called 鈥渆vening prayer,鈥 vespers is held around sunset. Its purpose: to give thanks for the day and offer a sacrifice of praise to God. In Jane Lewty鈥檚 Vespers, she superimposes the tropes of the Christian ritual onto a very different type of sacrifice鈥攖hat 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?
鈥淛ane 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.鈥濃擯eter Gizzi, author, Fierce Elegy
鈥淭his 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鈥攖o 鈥榖e an elaborate robot. be a full-blooded body鈥欌攁re not in opposition, and in their poetic conjoining reach for something tethered to the divine, but anchored here, in each particulate, noticed instant.鈥濃擟ody-Rose Clevidence, author, This Household of Earthly Nature
