Pole Dancing in the Night Club of God Walter Bargen

Help us in congratulating Donald Levering in his exciting accomplishment! It is an honor for his poem, "In Hospice" to be chosen as a finalist for the 2020 Prime Number Magazine Award.

   Like the poetry of Richard Hugo, whom George Looney invokes in so many of his own poems, this is a poetry deeply sad, the landscapes brutal, the images grim. I myself think often of contemporary balladeers such as Richard Thompson and Tom Waits reading this work, turning my mind to all that which we don’t expect art to notice, attend to, mourn and

The Pears of Budapest, casts its spell in many ways… most of all by magic. This collection is an outright enchantment, and these poems—with lines that float, land, and jolt—hold the reader a willing captive to both beauty and disturbing strangeness.  This, I contend, is a work of flat-out genius. —Joan Houlihan, Author of Shadow-feast