Poetry. Winner of the APR Honickman 1st Book Award. 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 Glück, from the Introduction.

Author City: SANTA FE, NM USA

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. Her books include SKY BURIAL (Copper Canyon Press, 2011), WEDDING DAY (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and IN THE SURGICAL THEATRE (Copper Canyon Press, 1999), winner of the prestigious APR/Honickman First Book Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University of New Mexico and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.