Skyspeak

In her much-anticipated second collection, Jan Heller Levi offers ardent, astonishing, individual poems in a trajectory that seems to suggest a story of one woman's life. But it's the realm of almost, the places of in-between - where rage and resignation, death and rebirth, the sayable and the unsayable, cannot be untwined - that Levi explores in the simultaneously harrowing and haunting Skyspeak. Here again are the delicious humor and the disarming directness - coupled with what Alice Fulton has called Levi's wicked ear - that graced her award-winning Once I Gazed at You in Wonder. Here again are poems so alive, as the author writes, it's killing me.