Hello and welcome to our Monday Poetry Review. Todays review is of Dana Levin.
Her unique use of line breaks, sentence choice and font changes all work together to fuel the imagination of the reader. Her poetry relies heavily on the imagery she creates. Above all I love the last line...it hangs like a glittering piece of crystal and is almost a poem of its own.
So without further ado, the poem
My Sentence
—spring wind with its
train of spoons,
kidney-bean shaped
pools, Floridian
humus, cicadas with their
electric appliance hum, cricket
pulse of dusk under
the pixilate gold of the trees, fall’s
finish, snow’s white
afterlife, death’s breath
finishing the monologue Phenomena, The Most Beautiful Girl
you carved the word because you craved the world—
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Levin’s collections of poetry include In the Surgical Theatre (1999), Wedding Day (2005), and Sky Burial (2011). Selecting Levin’s manuscript for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Louise Glück praised the work as “sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant.” In the Surgical Theatre also won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Osterweil Award.
She lives in Santa Fe and teaches at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design and Warren Wilson College.
Levin’s collections of poetry include In the Surgical Theatre (1999), Wedding Day (2005), and Sky Burial (2011). Selecting Levin’s manuscript for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Louise Glück praised the work as “sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant.” In the Surgical Theatre also won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Osterweil Award.
She lives in Santa Fe and teaches at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design and Warren Wilson College.