Wedding Day

by Dana Levin

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--Robert Pinsky, Washington Post

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2005

About the author

Dana Levin is the author of “Now Do You Know Where You Are,” a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Previous books include "Banana Palace," "Sky Burial," "Wedding Day" and "In the Surgical Theatre," which received nearly every award available to first books and emerging poets. The Los Angeles Times says of her work, "Dana Levin's poems are extravagant...her mind keeps making unexpected connections and the poems push beyond convention...they surprise us." About Sky Burial The New Yorker writes: "Sky Burial brings a wealth of rituals and lore from various strains of Buddhism, as well as Mesoamerican and other spiritual traditions, but the intensity and seriousness and openness of her investigations make Levin’s use of this material utterly her own, and utterly riveting." Levin has won the Rona Jaffe Writers Award, the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Reviews

[Christin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Jorie Graham, Dana Levin situates herself self-consciously at the center of her poems. She grapples with her own pain, suffering,and worry revolving around aesthetics--poetic form, teaching poetry, and words as revealers of meaning--and tries to reconcile it with that of the larger world. She casts her eye on the amputated, the drowned, men emerging from bushes with knives, wasted landscapes in which shopping carts are dragged swiftly downriver, a man and woman "finished off" by a shot to the head. Though the work may be too insular for those put off by poetry that is about the act of writing poetry, there are some little gems to be relished, such as this line, which prompted the book's title: "Pain is the ring./ By which the soul keeps its wedding vows."

[Cassa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for class; found it much more interesting than the others. Use of anatomical and "gross" imagery caught me and appealed to my medical side.

[H]

i didn’t understand it, but i did enjoy it

[Liza Schreiner · Rating 3 out of 5]

<3 : glass heart, ars poetica (pollen), ambivalent light, desire (golden mean), painting vacation, sumer is icumen in

[Twila Newey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rich in language, image and the questions she circles and circles. Forever current.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Techno" / "Cinema Verité" / "Ars Poetica" (13) / "Glass Heart" / "Ars Poetica" (16) / "Glory" / "Working Methods" / "Ambivalent Light" / "Desire" (57)

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

As much as I'd like to reproduce here a poem from this collection, Levin's use of white space—and the limitations of Goodreads' formatting options—makes this impossible...

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

a bit self-conscious for my personal taste.