Debt

The velocity of these poems will induce motion sickness in some readers, and exhilaration in others. But Levine's aerial acrobatics always return us, largely intact, to common ground. It might even be sacred ground. For all its existentialist pratfalls and murderous chicanery, DEBT is a profoundly elegiac work, from its dedicatory epitaph to the final poem's darkling closure. Our heaviest debt, the most timeless poems remind us, is to the historical dead.--Srikanth Reddy, from the new introduction