“levato is himself an avant-garde poet whose work draws on cinematic and documentary techniques—in his own words, “engages subject matter through disruption of content and form, fragmentation of narrative and radical juxtaposition of visual and textual elements.” his poems, truly products of postmodern culture, sample: they collect, cut and redistribute pieces of other poems into new configurations. one long work, “aurora,” makes a fragmented, haunting dialogue of pieces of robert browning’s and elizabeth barrett browning’s poems. a significant part of levato’s work is something called cinépoetry, a kind of collaged videographic poetry that does with footage what his other work does with language. levato also translates, a kind of work vitally connected to his poetic work, which involves so much transformation of extant materials into new forms.”—alli carlisle, outsider institution: the avant-garde pedagogy of the chicago school of poetics