Life Cycle of a Bear

Steven Kleinman's Life Cycle of a Bear, winner of the 2019 Philip Levine Poetry Prize, selected by C.G. Hanzlicek, is an antidote to a moment defined by fatalism and fake news. The effort to imagine the specific, to show truth and prove it no matter how violent, dominates these poems: a man can be a bear, a death can happen again and again, a dead friend can be every villain while also being remembered as the source of everything good in the world. Kleinman's poems cleave unapologetically to metaphor not in an effort to obfuscate the world, but in order to transform it.