Nightwork

Lauren Levin’s Nightwork chronicles the inner workings of a mind at night, when thoughts assemble and come apart in unpredictable ways. A particular focus of these poems is the encroachment of the internet not only on our daily lives, but also in the realm of the subconscious. In one poem, a technological phantasmagoria is conjured through the codes and URLs that expose anxieties surrounding the experience of being tracked and surveilled: “zip code + 3 order / sort / free conference.com.” Emails haunt the speaker of another poem, who insists: “I know this is night / where I was living / and saw emails / who lived lived before.” Later, the speaker recalls they “saw emails / with subject lines / and thought they had to be mine.”

The language of the nine long poems that comprise this book is erratic and nonlinear, formatted in narrow columns that run over several pages, moving between coherence and incoherence, like a mind descending into sleep:

events are
like people
but for you
who are people
the bridge
some phone
adheres
speed
no doubt.

Levin’s “nightwork” seems to implicitly refer back to the Freudian concept of dreamwork, the process though which unconscious thoughts are transferred into consciousness, only here night itself reveals the chaos out of which thought emerges, and the peculiar ways in which technology structures our inner worlds.