Reviews for In the Surgical Theatre

The average rating for In the Surgical Theatre based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-03-05 00:00:00 Chelsea Murray Although I find it a great luxury, and feel so fortunate, to be inundated with poetry, one unfortunate side effect is that it's now rarer for a poem to give me chills, to cause that visceral reaction that thrills me into reading it again right away. When this does happen, I am ecstatic and reinvigorated by poetry's power. Hence, I am happy to report that this phenomenon happened several times in Dana Levin's extraordinary first collection. In poem after poem, she meditates on the grotesque and finds sublimity in the intricate connection between the minutiae of the body, its miraculous functions and malfunctions, and the leaps of faith it takes to be present in this humanly flawed world. Yet, the beauty of these poems is that they are grounded in very recognizable human situations that Levin masterfully observes and harvests for their metaphoric qualities. As the title suggests, this book takes place in a "theatre" of sorts: a place where human drama is displayed for all to access its lessons and postulations on how to be better at being human.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-13 00:00:00 Brock Smith I re-read this on the train this week and upgraded my review, because I'd forgotten/never noticed how effing amazing the first section is. The second and third sections don't quite (quite) blow the top of my head off in the same way, but hey. I can see their projects more clearly now--I think I was just too young/dumb/envious when I read this before. It's stupendously good--as Gluck says in her introduction, its consistency and coherency and just plain balls-out strength of voice, for a first book, are astounding. That it's paced throughout the whole ms without losing its sense of urgency is even more of an accomplishment. Levin seams vast swaths of poem together with devices such as the repeated insistent questioning (variations on Plath's "Will you marry it, marry it, marry it?")--and maybe I never got before this reading that the "you" of almost all the poems indicates a direct challenging address to the self? What can I say, I'm slow to catch on. Fantastic stuff which I will urge onto students for as long as they let me.