U.S. national debt amounted to almost four and a half trillion dollars in 1993, the year that a Canadian-born arriviste made his literary debut on the American poetry scene. Twenty-five years later, this public liability—solemnly referred to as “historical debt” by the United States Treasury Department—has nearly quintupled in size. By this disquieting measure alone, Mark Levine’s Debt seems even more timely now than it did a quarter of a century ago.

But Debt affords today’s reader more, or less, than a lyric critique of our dysfunctional political economy. Levine’s unruly poems want nothing to do with dialectical reasoning, regulatory dreams of systemic reform, or any political pretense whatsoever. “I can’t nod since my accident,” protests the disenfranchised speaker of “The Election.” Always-already damaged by some foundational trauma, Levine’s personae simply cannot signify their assent to collective life—be it a revolutionary regime or the American dream—even as they fail to dissent from its historical horrors. “The soldiers torched the crops while retreating,” an emblematic poem, titled “Poem,” begins. “It only seemed fair.”

Declining to police its own disorderly poetic conduct, Debt cops to all sorts of bad behavior: bad jokes, bad–faith prosodies, and other bad literary manners that soon became the studied mannerisms of a new generation of American poets. In the wake of Vietnam, disco, apartheid, and AIDS, its wicked humor reboots Berryman’s Dream Songs for the geopolitical twilight of the late 20th Century:

I’m making that old–time noise again.

I confess. I confess

to wishing “everything” were not possible.

In retrospect, more than one mode of confessionalism acquired a fraudulent air under the Clinton era’s global dispensation of neoliberal freedoms. (If “everything” is possible, what could possibly be “true”?) This may be why many American readers, including myself, were so dazzled by the savage parody of Whitmanic self-assertion woven throughout Debt: “I am the standing militia, / a quill, the Red Cross, I am the feather / in my cap, the Hebrew Testament, I am the World Court.” For a contemporary audience, however, the reissued volume may speak to a deeper Cartesian pathology. “The old dance begins again,” writes Levine, “I think I am. I think I am.” There is no “therefore” to this cogito, only the little engine that could—by force of repetition—make it to the end of a story for children.

Striking up “that old–time noise again,” Debt puts on a historical Vaudeville show—verging, more often than not, on Grand Guignol–for modern readers. We visit the pyramids; we participate in the French Revolution; we stumble through the Industrial Revolution; we are visited by the Holocaust, the Crusades, the Iran hostage crisis, or all of these man–made calamities at once. Yet Levine escorts us through this world–historical wasteland with the slapstick precision of a veteran, and possibly intoxicated, stunt pilot:

. . . I have landed the craft

on water, on ice floes, I have stopped short of the glass

tower, breaking nothing. I get places. Yes. I’m in one

place, I’m in another place, in–between is a white streak.

The velocity of these poems will induce motion–sickness in some readers, and exhilaration in others. But Levine’s aerial acrobatics always return us, largely intact, to common ground. It might even be sacred ground. For all its existentialist pratfalls and murderous chicanery, Debt is a profoundly elegiac work, from its dedicatory epitaph to the final poem’s darkling closure. Our heaviest debt, the most timeless poems remind us, is to the historical dead.

Midway through Debt, the poet pauses to reflect on his literary spade-work: “I am bending my knees when I speak. More a shovel / than a lover.” It is one of those fugitive moments when contemporary poetry approaches something like ancient wisdom. We bend our knees to dig, but also to pray for those we have buried. Then we depart, and they remain. “You were the life I had to leave,” one might say before turning to go. “It was too good.” And yet what remains is not unlike what must move on:

Do you hear the wind? It has nowhere to go.

A poem that says otherwise is a lie.