Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series)
"Dzvinia Orlowsky's new book is full of the gift of life—its preciousness, its frailty, and the duende too, the passion to look unflinchingly at death. She's unwilling to sentimentalize, to patch over the difficult; she steadfastly resists the tawdry willful cheeriness that passes for transcendence. In 'Sexual Water,' Pablo Neruda says, 'Like an eye held hideously open,' and I think yes, this is the purpose of poetry: to look, to attend, to inhabit fully. In the white spaces between stanzas, in her attentive eye for original and un-invented images, in her dark, ironic wit, Orlowsky has drawn her poems close to the heart: teeming, damaged, defended and broken—which is to say, fully human." (Ira Sadoff)