Margins
In the Surgical Theatre book cover
In the Surgical Theatre
1999
First Published
4.29
Average Rating
96
Number of Pages

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.

Avg Rating
4.29
Number of Ratings
189
5 STARS
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4 STARS
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3 STARS
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2 STARS
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1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

Dana Levin
Dana Levin
Author · 6 books
Dana Levin is the author of “Now Do You Know Where You Are,” a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Previous books include "Banana Palace," "Sky Burial," "Wedding Day" and "In the Surgical Theatre," which received nearly every award available to first books and emerging poets. The Los Angeles Times says of her work, "Dana Levin's poems are extravagant...her mind keeps making unexpected connections and the poems push beyond convention...they surprise us." About Sky Burial The New Yorker writes: "Sky Burial brings a wealth of rituals and lore from various strains of Buddhism, as well as Mesoamerican and other spiritual traditions, but the intensity and seriousness and openness of her investigations make Levin’s use of this material utterly her own, and utterly riveting." Levin has won the Rona Jaffe Writers Award, the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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