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.

From "Ars Poetica"

"Six monarch butterfly cocoons
clinging to the back of your throat--
you could feel their gold wings trembling. . ."

Dana Levin's singular voice and talent are unmistakable. "Wedding Day" is Levin's quest to synthesize the public and private, to find pattern and connection amid the disparate elements of modern life. Relentless in her examinations, she ultimately puts faith in poetry, believing it is the truest means--and best chance--to bridge the chasms between soul and society. Readers will put faith in Levin's poetry as well.

Dana Levin grew up in California's Mojave Desert. Her debut volume, "In the Surgical Theatre," received nearly every honor available for first books and emerging writers. Other honors include fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe and Whiting Foundations. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, Levin chairs the Creative Writing and Literature Department at College of Santa Fe in Sante Fe, New Mexico

From Library Journal

For her debut collection, "In the Surgical Theat"re, ""Levin (creative writing, Coll. of Santa Fe) won the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares; it's no wonder, then, that her follow-up has been anticipated by academic scholars and poetry lovers, who won't be disappointed. While her first work focused on the gritty details of physical matter, often its desecration or decay, Levin's current work offers insight into the most personal and unspoken thoughts that can be easily overlooked: "we were losing our bodies/ digitized salt of bytes and speed we were becoming a powder/ light/ bicarbonate/ what we might have seen, if we had looked." Her voice speaks to the private wars of self and the dark violence of reflection. Readers will find that this work carries the pulse of their darkest sorrows, in the breath of their humanity. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.--April Davis, STG International, NIST, Oakotn, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information

"intimate and hyponotic...whether turning her gaze inward or outward, these poems question the moral, aesthetic, and metaphysic needs that poetry exists to fill."

--Ploughshares

"Dana Levin's poems are extravagant...her mind keeps making unexpected connections and the poems push beyond convention...they surprise us."

--LA Times

"Images that are satisfyingly clear...and excitingly inexplicable"

--Robert Pinsky, Washington Post

"Readers will find that this work carries the pulse of their darkest sorrows, in the breath of their humanity. Highly recommended."--"Library Journal"

"Intimate and hypnotic."--"Ploughshares"

"Levin has the skilled ear, magnificent tongue, and fierce mind of the truly prophetic."--"Rain Taxi"

"Levin's work is phenomenological; it details how it feels to be an embodied consciousness making its way through the world."--"Boston Review"

"Death is the new and unshakeable lens through which I see," writes Dana Levin about her third book, in which she confronts mortality and loss in subjects ranging from Tibetan Buddhist burial practices to Aztec human sacrifice. Shaped by dreams and "the worms and the gods," these poems are a profound investigation of our inescapable fate. As Louise Gluck has said: "Levin's animating fury goes back deeper into our linguistic and philosophic history: to Blake's tiger, to the iron judgments of the Old Testament."

"They took you in an ambulance even though you were dead,
they took you"

"and my sister said"

"Why are you saving her if she is dead?"

"shey shey--"

"Curve of sky a crescent blade."

"Vultures wheeling
on thermal parapets, shunyata, "

"void that flays--"

"Yak butter,
barley flour and tea: you watch him"

"make the paste."

Dana Levin's debut volume "In the Surgical Theatre" won 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.