Wild Domestic

Wild Domestic: 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 Soutine: "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 ground: "In her teeth/now a rose, now a dagger, / she slashes her world." --Gabriel Levin