Wedding Day by Dana Levin

Wedding Day, poems by Dana Levin (Copper Canyon): Intimate and hypnotic, the poems of Levin's wonderful second book operate as a lens through which we are simultaneously granted two views: one into the darker, private interior of the self, the other of an outer-world turned otherworldly by the poet's eye. Whether turning her gaze inward or outward, these poems question the moral, aesthetic, and metaphysic needs that poetry exists to fulfill; Levin posits a lovely and revelatory analogy when she likens the "American poet" to "[a] cricket trilling endlessly against the din of traffic. / Inaudible, unless you stood right at the spot where it lodged itself in a little crack between the walk and the wall . . . legg[ing] the air ceaselessly where no one could hear it." —Cate Marvin