Levee

The poems in Paul Otremba's Levee explore the intersection between the ecological, the political, and the personal in a world built on oil and greed. The city of Houston is at once backdrop and metaphor for the ways in which violence--both natural and manmade--have become part and parcel of twenty-first century life. "It's a luxury to be this calm," Otremba writes in the opening poem, a held-breath between the disastrous effects of hurricanes and cancer. Yet Otremba's exquisite lines manage to wrest meaning from the devastation wrought by both global warming and a terminal illness: "If there is a lesson / on how not to worry, it's that you're not stuck only being one thing, /the multitudes in me and the multitudes in you."