Howard Levy’s extraordinary lyric gifts are in full display in Dreams & Maldreams, winner of the 2026 Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Prize.
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With his stunning lyric gift, Howard Levy’s Dreams & Maldreams moves us trance-like through landscapes both welcoming and ice-laden. These are poems of a lived life, a plea not to “drift away silently” but to be with the intensity of the world where “clouds join to forge a sky of withered light.” His Exile poems, meditations on Antarctica, bring us to a harsh landscape where a baby seal is alone and dying, where the exotic is “the mountains/…capes furred in a white/that is the whitest shade of white”. Levy is never simply an observer, instead he ignites us, plants us firmly in wonder.
–Anne Marie Macari, author of Amerigun
How alone he is/ in this unwelcoming, frigid/ unsunned place.” This is the poet at the bottom of the world – in Antarctica, where he argues “cold is the truest condition of is.” Years later, on another continent, in “newborn light,” Howard Levy celebrates love’s “poles” instead, the magnetic field of a love that took him by surprise. In his gorgeous “Suite in the Key of Late Sunlight,” he will convince even the loneliest reader that it’s never too late to find ourselves “speeding to each other”.
–Allison Funk, author of The Visible Woman
Early in Dreams & Maldreams, Levy writes of “how poems must charge into the wind of aloneness,” and that charge here proves bracing. While abounding in probing observations and philosophical inquiry, these poems also attain a tone of sublime austerity. Expansive in space and time, they manage to straddle not only land and sea but the primal and the modern, transporting the reader so far as the south pole and as near as a subway car. Rare is it to find a craft as honed and assured as Levy’s, able to ferry us from isolation to love, from desolation to grace.
–Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Lessons with Scissors
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ISBN: 979-8-234-11298-9
Trade Paperback: size 6 x 9
Price: $20.00 Publication
Date: September, 2026
Howard Levy is the author of two previous collections of poetry: A Day This Lit (CavanKerry Press, 2000) and Spooky Action at a Distance (CavanKerry Press, 2014). He was a winner of a New York State Creative Artists Program grant in poetry and taught for many years at The Frost Place Conference in Franconia, New Hampshire. He lives in Amagansett, New York.