The Dark Opens
With fierce and powerful writing, The Dark Opens by Miriam Levine sends her readers into a life deluged by love and loss, into people and places we have not yet known. Levine attends to the intricacies of love with unfailing tenderness, reaching into the dark yield of loss to locate the clear and concise language of reconceived faith. "I have no job but to praise," she insists, and she does, turning her attention toward motherhood, the body, and small pleasures like alpine strawberries in frost that are "wine-sweet, but with a sting, / a taste like flint and snow, eau-de-vie, icy red and soft." In her watchfulness, nothing slips past Levine as she rejoices in what echoes through her world.