Customer Reviews

In the Surgical Theatre

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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.

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!

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....