Transient

Gail Levine's Transient is a gift to us. Relentlessly, Levine's imagery delivers a raw truth. Her music questions and celebrates both nature and the terse moments of the personal. These poems have been worked on, shaped, and we believe the speaker when she says, "I'm a good person,//and the sunflower was good, too." The everyday grows spiritual, monumental. The small things, often taken for granted, all add up to sharp levity and wit, and we are inside Levine's Transient, a clear-eyed vision honed by experience.

âYusef Komunyakaa

Triumphantly, Gail Carson Levine's poems are never distant, but are always radiantly close. She burnishes ordinariness with brief candor, catching us the way that Ted Kooser or Issa or even Emily Dickinson (if Emily had shopped at Macy's and read Archie comics) can do. Each of the poems in Transient blasts a brilliant light because Gail Carson Levine won't turn away from despair. Her word pictures in visceral color insist that a direct line of vision is the supreme virtue. Each event this poet beholds, whether a brain injury, plaque in the veins or simply old age, becomes "one thing unvaried all the way through." Transient, in Carson Levine's own words, creates "spring internal."

âMolly Peacock