“Jane Lewty transforms the ancient ritual of evening prayer into a searching, contemporary art of attention. Through antiphons, hymns, and restless meditations, she threads together city light and basilica shadow, art history and automatons, dread and devotion, asking what it means to persist. These poems are intellectually agile and lyrically electric. Radiant, restless, and formally daring, Vespers makes twilight an aperture where language itself becomes a form of necessary vigil.”—Peter Gizzi, author, Fierce Elegy

“This masterful project unfolds as a series of poetic, investigative responses to algorithmic commands orbiting around liturgical, calendrical, devotional, and sexual practice. Jane Lewty builds with fine-tuned language a phenomenological, conceptual world in which her two directives—to ‘be an elaborate robot. be a full-blooded body’—are not in opposition, and in their poetic conjoining reach for something tethered to the divine, but anchored here, in each particulate, noticed instant.”—Cody-Rose Clevidence, author, This Household of Earthly Nature