The American Poetry Review /Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry 1999 Winner Dana Levin for In The Surgical Theatre Judged by Louise Gluck "...at the book's center (and reaching into all the surrounding material) is the surgical theatre, an image, like Plath's bees, metaphorically fertile, its manifold resonances revealed through Levin's extraordinary and demanding intelligence. The danger of such powerful figures is the danger of lesser imagination, imagination content with the first circle of revelation. What in such a smaller talent might have proved repetitious, banal, self glorifying, is, here, the heart of an astonishing book." --Louise Gluck, from the Introduction

Banishing the Angels, from In The Surgical Theater And then the cloud passed and a light came rushing down the steps of the subway, and blazed up against the phone booth standing in the corner, and inside it was a girl talking on the phone, all lit up amid the grime of the subway, and when I saw her I wanted her to be an angel, I wanted her with wings inside the station, to say "the angel on the phone" and see it softly beating, old newspapers at its feet and no one noticing, white and gold in the dirty glass, blazing religious in the piss and exhaust, an oddity bright in the life of the phone booth, an angel in a box in the filtered sun, where I was straining to look back at the light rushing down, at the girl who was not an angel talking on the phone, in the real light of the unmystical sun, thinking the girl who is not an angel is something to believe -- the phone booth in the sunlight, something to believe -- [Order books online] [Book Prize home]