Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction
Winner of the 2024 Wolfson Press Poetry Chapbook Prize
by Julia B. Levine
Introduction by Nancy Botkin
cover art by Carolyn Zacharias McAdams, "Silhouettes and the Movement of Time"
paperback, 78 pages
2025
From the Introduction by Nancy Botkin
The question of how we reconcile nature’s astounding beauty and its unflinching indifference to suffering is one that surfaces when reading the exquisite poems in Julia B. Levine’s Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction. In an early poem, “How It Begins,” the speaker wakes in the night only to hear a coyote eating a heron; she listens to its “broken singing.” Death is imminent and inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we won’t call out its cruelty, or rage against life’s unfairness, or plead with an absent God. The story within these pages is heartbreaking: her infant grandson has cancer. She’s a witness to his chemo treatments, his fight for life in the ICU, and his stay in the pediatric oncology ward. Unfair, indeed.
She breaks away from the madness and finds respite in the natural world—its beauty—and her faith in its ability to restore hope. How would one live without staying alert to lush fields where “earth cracked open into yellow bells// tiny velvet cups” or “striped lacewings dip in and out of purple wands”? But here’s the catch: humans are destroying the very planet that sustains them (the earth’s sixth extinction is man-made). Another question: If the grandson survives, isn’t he entitled to experience nature’s pleasures and abundances? One of her many strengths is juxtaposing the sterile hospital room and its cold machinery with California landscapes teeming with life. Or not, since some of it has been or is being destroyed by drought and other catastrophic events. “It’s hard to love what may die/ too soon,” she asserts in the title poem.
Reviews
Julia Levine’s Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction is an album of moments, a testament to a family’s love in the face of pediatric oncology. These poems distill so many days and memories down to their most particular bright and painful details—the lavender fields, the hallways full of ghosts and origami cranes, the family huddled around a crib as if warming their hands by a fire. Levine astonished me poem after poem by refusing easy answers and predictable comforts. There were so many questions with unknown answers, so many prayers that were answered with “death only asks for everything.” Every line woke up a new corner of my heart. If you are constantly in awe of how the body is a difficult miracle, this book is for you.
—Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal
Blurbs are supposed to be, or often are, these very lofty, poetically rote pieces of language. You read one you read ’em all. Julia asked me to write one for her newest collection, Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction. So I read the book. I read it twice. It worked on my body. It made me weep like a child. It made me cry my eyes out like a father, like a parent. How do you withstand the living moments when a grandchild is sick, has cancer? You explore death from the outside. That’s what Julia Levine does in these poems: she explores death, being up against it, being slammed up against a wall and a wave by the possibility of the death of her grandchild in poems that have the most bone-aged tenderness in them that all you can do, if you are any kind of breathing, sweating, soaked built person, is cry. This is a crying book. It’s a love book filled with a love you can’t even put into words, and that’s what happens. That’s what happened to me. I wanted to go home and hold my kids or just talk smack with them and laugh and yell and fall down and get up because we could, because we can. I did not want to write this blurb because I don’t know how. The poems in this collection don’t deserve words. You just have to read them and let them work their gut-magic on your body because if we all did there would be no worry about the next world extinction, or at least the next extinction would not be created by the human element, because there would just be too much love. That’s what Julia Levine’s poems are in Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction: they are too much love that they are the best sweetest song ever.
—Matthew Lippman, author of We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On
About the Author
Julia B. Levine’s recent poetry awards include the 2015 Northern California Book Award for her fourth collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU 2014), a 2024 Pushcart Prize, the 2024 Terrain Poetry Prize, the 2023 Oran Robert Perry Burke Award from The Southern Review, as well as a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her work in building resiliency in teenagers in the context of climate change. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Nation, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and Prairie Schooner. She earned a PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry from Pacific University. Her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms (LSU 2021), won a Nautilus Silver Award in Poetry. sites.google.com/view/juliablevine
About the Cover Artist
Carolyn Zacharias McAdams was born and raised in north Texas. She has a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of North Texas in Denton. She was awarded the Medal of Honor from the National Association of Women Artists, Inc., and was one of five finalists for “featured artists” in the Texas Biennial 2009. Her art is featured in The Southern Review (Winter 2025). McAdams is represented by Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas, and LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans. She lives and works with two cats in Denton, Texas.
