“…at the book’s center (and reaching into all the surrounding material) is the surgical theater, am image, like Plath’s bees, metaphorically fertile, its manifold resonances revealed through Levin’s extraordinary and demanding intelligence. The danger of such powerful images is the danger of lesser imagination, imagination content with the first circle of revelation. What in such a smaller talent might have proved repetitious, banal, self glorifying, is, here, the heart of an astonishing book.”

— Louise Gluck, from the introduction