Transient

The poems in Transient will stay with you. When the world turns to war, you’ll remember “Manufactured Rage,” while “Dreaming Washington Irving” will fast-forward you through the stages of your own life. Called up by such poems as “Reunion” and “Lunch at Monica’s House,” lost friends and family will return and visit. In poems like “L.E.D. R.I.P,” you’ll put the dark in humor up against the funny in tragedy. And if you wonder what ET makes of all of it, you’ll return to “Do They Deduce We Had Lips,” the debut poem in this debut collection by acclaimed children’s book author Gail Carson Levine. Those who look to Levine for the fantastic will find a dog-faced man, Medusa, Pygmalion, a hero of the Iliad, and--Jughead!–seen through a lens more Sexton than Seuss. The emotional range here is both broad and nuanced: humor, nostalgia, grief, shame, anger, regret, fear, and even–occasionally–joy. Throughout, in every-day language gracefully arranged, Levine elevates ordinary ideas and common experience so that all is haloed in light.