Christmas Show

Harriet Levin is a wonderfully courageous and exacting poet. . . . [Her] poems will attract many readers. —from the Introduction by Eavan Boland

Beginning with the stunning title poem about her younger sister's brutal rape, Harriet Levin juxtaposes the ordinary with the terrible in this powerful collection.If, as Housman once claimed, poetry is that which makes your hair stand on end as you read it, then Harriet Levin's The Christmas Show is poetry. . . . Her poems call to something deep within us. In truth they haunt us with their very human witness. —Paul Mariani, author of The Great Wheel

"Early in her powerful new book, The Christmas Show, Harriet Levin, with stunning tenderness, says about the long-term damage caused by the horrifying rape of her sister: 'But this / is how my life is different from my sister's, / I have not been forced to struggle for it.' But she is wrong. She has struggled honorably with her sister's pain and the pain of others, and out of her struggle she has brought this passionate and eloquent book." —Andrew Hudgins, author of The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood