Natania Rosenfeld Book order

Wild such contraries, deftly held in balance, lie at the heart of Natania Rosenfeld's debut collection in which poems are energized as much by the poet's life-affirming, lush, appetitive drives as they are reined in by her sober-eyed vision of caged birds of prey and flayed rabbits; I am thinking in particular of the remarkable sequence inspired by "The torso stretched / like pulled meat, / a skull, vacant bloody / mouth at the point / of the genitals." Rosenfeld knows how to write to the tight, serrated measures of duress--war-ravaged Europe haunts her imagination--but in the end it is the robust, androgynous body and its runaway anima that gain the high "In her teeth/now a rose, now a dagger, / she slashes her world." --Gabriel Levin