Posts in Books
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.

Read More
In Paterson

Miriam Levine gives us an eloquent novel that is an elegy to a past generation whose desire for love and tenacious battle for survival prefigure the passions of a new generation.  Levine’s protagonist is European-born widower Ben Shein, a brilliant furrier reestablishing the family business in Paterson. The Sheins have come through the Great Depression and seem poised for success.  But Ben’s life takes a horrifying turn. Suspenseful, driven by compassion, wisdom, and courage, this is a work from a vibrant new voice in American fiction. 

Read More
BooksMiriam Levine
Devotion

To Miriam Levine, “devotion” implies love and self-creation; to her mother’s generation, it meant martyrdom and self-denial. The domain of this memoir is the interval between those attitudes. Devotion is the expression of a sensibility that trusts the physical―a facet of women’s existence that is at once ennobling and primary, transcendent and spiritual. Affirming her deep connection to people, Levine draws from a rich expanse of memories, misgivings, epiphanies, and associations to tell of the adventures and dangers of her emergence as a woman writer.

Read More
BooksMiriam Levine
The Graves of Delawanna

The Graves of Delawanna is a record of trial and redemption. Miriam Levine’s impassioned poems move between the exhilaration of solitude and the poignancy of connection. These are visionary poems of the fallen world of gritty, industrial, northern New Jersey, and the silk mills of Paterson. They register the shocks of disenchantment and near-death. They also describe experiences of saving grace: unbidden, “a door of gold” appears in a vision, “molten without heat,” and somehow takes away the poet’s burden; a neighbor offers a rose, “heaps the swollen graft tip, / tenders with bent fingers.” Levine accepts the gift.

Read More
To Know We Are Living

The poems of To Know We Are Living show super-sensitivity and resilience. Intimate expressions of connection to people and places, Miriam Levine’s lyric poems address the living and the dead: family, children, lovers, friends and admired writers. They chart the poet’s mind alive to life’s contradictions and history’s tragedy.

Read More