In the Surgical Theatre [Paperback]

Dana Levin (Author)

Book Description

Series: APR Honickman 1st Book Award | Publication Date: October 15, 1999

A doctor contemplates Lenin's embalmed body; two angels flank an open chest during a heart transplant; a father's anger turns into a summer thunderstorm... Each of Levin's poems is an astonishing investigation of human darkness, propelled by a sensuous syntax and a desire for healing.

"This is the language of a prophet: Levin's art, in this book certainly, takes place in a kind of mutating day of judgment: it means to wipe a film from our eyes. It is a dare, a challenge, and, for all its considerable beauty, the opposite of the seductive...Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels."-Louise Gluck, from the Introduction

Dana Levin was raised in Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Arts Council, and New York University, where she received her M.F.A. She lives in New Mexico and teaches Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In poem after poem envisioning the porousness of the human bodyAbreachable in sex, by food and bacteria, but also by angels at the moment of deathALevin writes a harrowing poetry that at times aspires to the unstable intensity of Sylvia Plath and the millennial resonance of Tony Kushner, but settles for ordinary morbidity in the manner of C. K. Williams or Sharon Olds. This second winner of the American Poetry Review's First Book Prize is divided into three parts, "Body," "Home" and "World." Where "Body" gives Levin sanction to engage in an almost painterly obsession, recasting the same few images with mounting and incontrovertible anxiety, "Home" and "World" predictably engage their subjectsAabusive siblings, decaying animal remains, Slobodan MilosevicAwith not especially enlightening invective. "Body," too, is problematic; "Bathhouse, 1980" seems to seekA"through Richard's eyes"Ato capitalize on both the excitement and abandon of pre-AIDS sexuality and on the horror of plague, while subliminally taking a blame-the-victims tone. The indented lines outlining depression, exhaustion and scavenging are somewhat of an improvement on their mainly forgettable precursors, but the lack of variation, while flagged by contest judge Louise Gluck in the book's introduction as a hallmark of Levin's maturity, may also indicate a limit. Still, the talent that produced "a roar of angels swarming over the body, burrowing headfirst into every pore" may yet imagine new ways into all the subjects everybody thinks they know.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

The Baby On The Table
Banishing The Angels
Bathhouse, 1980
The Beautiful Names: 1.
The Beautiful Names: 2.
The Beautiful Names: 3.
Body Of Magnesia
Chill Core
Door
Eyeless Baby
Fever
Field
First Cradle: 1.
First Cradle: 2.
First Cradle: 3.
His Defense
Hive
In The Surgical Theatre
Lenin's Bath
Magpie
Marvelous Father
Movie
The Nurse
Paul, Roosevelt Island
Personal History
Personal History
Power
The Problem Of Light
Silo
Sleep
Smoke
Wind
Wing
Witness
The Work: 1
The Work: 2
The Work: 3
The Work: 4
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press; First Edition edition (October 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0966339533
• ISBN-13: 978-0966339536
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #631,297 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ploughshares Recommended Books 1999-00, January 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: In the Surgical Theatre (Paperback)

I love this book and found a great review by Susan Conley in Ploughshares:...Winner of the inaugural APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Louise Gluck, this fiercely intelligent book is grounded firmly in the realm of American confessional poetry, but Levin wisely and skillfully manipulates conventional boundary lines. The "future of the body" is in question here, and the rich symbolism of this corporeal and spiritual investigation supports this volume in a complex architecture. Lines between truth and fiction, history and autobiography, continuously blur in the book's dark, elliptical explorations....What amazes in this collection is how various speakers hover over bloody bodies, over wreckage of nuclear families and inconsolable anger, and still choose to go back into the body because they "can't bear not feeling."....Yet, it is often the device of the angels that holds these...poems together. Much is asked of these harbringers of life. Angels instead of surgeons handle the scalpels in the title poem, presiding over the sick....Like Rilke's angels in the Duino Elegies, Levin's angels know pain and despair, but ultimately they are transcendent witnesses who give this fine book its wings.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gory, insightful and visceral, April 25, 2005

By 

Erik D. Harshman "E.D. Harshman" (St. Louis, Missouri) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In the Surgical Theatre (Paperback)

I studied under Ms. Levin at the College of Santa Fe for 4 years in the English dept.
I heard readings from this book long before it was published and even still went to readings AFTER it had been published and I was well-versed in the material.
Dana loves blood imagery, she loves sexual imagery and, man, does she love the underbelly of the world.
Read her work if you want the view of one of the ONLY great poets still living today.
And if you want more read her contemporary, and one of my faves, Jon Davis. Whose book SCRIMMAGE OF APPETITE will change your life forever.
Thanks, Dana!

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply brilliant, June 25, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: In the Surgical Theatre (Paperback)

After having read the book, I heard Ms. Levin read in Chelsea, and I must say, I was amazed. My word will never be sufficient....