I Remember Not Sleeping by Sherri Levine, Reviewed by Lana Hectman Ayers

Reviewed by Lana Hectman Ayers

I Remember Not Sleeping by Sherri Levine (author), Moises Camacho (Illustrator)
Fernwood Press, 2024, 64 pages, $28
ISBN 978-1594981395

Available at https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2024/08/05/i-remember-not-sleeping/ and sherrilevine.com

 

I Remember Not Sleeping book cover

A hybrid of poem, memoir, literary quotes, and graphic novel, I Remember Not Sleeping is an extraordinary collaboration between Oregon poet Sherri Levine and Mexico-born California artist /illustrator Moises Camacho. Levine’s title poem, which is the entire text of this book, relates the disorienting experience of being hospitalized for mental health issues in a foreign county. Utilizing spare language and haunting images, in addition to being completely original, this volume is an homage to artist Joe Brainard’s 1970 beloved groundbreaking experimental memoir called I Remember.

In the Forward, Levine writes of a professor who questioned her about being confined to the mental hospital in the Czech republic:

“Tell us what the hospital is like,” he said. I didn’t want to do that. My visit with him was the only chance I got to leave the hospital. I am not Sylvia Plath. I am here. I am alive.

The speaker’s declaration brings to mind Emily Dickenson’s poem 340, “I felt a funeral in my brain” and Dickenson’s feeling of premature dismissal: “And I dropped down and down, and down - / And hit a World, at every plunge…” Levine desperately wants to focus on healing and health and possibilities, not dive more deeply into frustration and despair.

Levine’s poem expresses the sparse memories she has of the disorienting and troubling things that happened to her in the hospital, including multiple sexual encounters and being watched by people with flashlights, even while she was showering. These memories reveal the ways individuals suffering with mental health issues are ill-treated, neglected, and often harmed by the supposedly therapeutic environments in which they are placed. Levine writes: 

I was afraid if I didn’t
get the answers right
/ /
something bad would
happen to me.

That fear comes across as well-founded given the details that are revealed about her institutionalization.

As effective as the spare words of the poem are Camacho’s illustrations, full of dimmed areas, superimposed images, shadows, and a sense of unreality or super-reality, all of which enhance the poem’s themes of confusion and misery.

As her hospitalization experience comes to a close, Levine notes: Snow fell on the last night in Prague / before I got on a plane to the States.

Again, I am reminded of Emily Dickenson, the closing stanza of poem of 372, “A formal feeling comes,” that states: “This is the Hour of Lead – / Remembered, if outlived, / As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – / First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –” There is relief in Levine’s lines, and also the implication that fragments of this chilling time will always be with her.

I Remember Not Sleeping is a brave, beautiful, and powerful book in which Levine’s honesty and vulnerability serve as compassionate and companionable testimony for anyone struggling with mental health issues, or any issues around which there is often unfounded societal shaming. This book encourages the making of art as an element of healing, a means of taking one’s power back, and a way of emerging from darkness and shadows into the light.


CONTENT WARNING:
This book contains references to sex and a graphic image of a sexual act.
This review was previously published in Raven Chronicles Press, December 4, 2024.

Reviewer Bio:

Lana Hechtman Ayers is a poet and managing editor of three small presses. Her latest collection is The Autobiography of Rain from Fernwood Press (https://barclaypress.corecommerce.com/the-autobiography-of-rain.html)

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Scroll to Top