How Therapists Dance follows the numinous thread described by Novalis:
The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.
As in the first poem, in which snails scrawl the names of Buddhas with their silvery trails and ends with the poet kissing his wife's hands, taking out the garbage, and being confronted with an overwhelming moon. These poems stitch together psychiatric ward encounters with the musings of security guards in an art gallery; an urban dance floor provoking a breakthrough for a stranded therapist; his father's empty shotgun shells, his aunt's accordion finding its way inside the body, ribs expanding and contracting as though you are an instrument life is still learning how to play.
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How Therapists Dance is the meeting ground for the spiritual seeker, the therapist and the observant poet who negotiates this tricky terrain and writes poems for them all. There is humor and longing, tenderness and beauty. Each of these voices has its say. From them I learn how enlightenment is spoiled by wanting it too much. How the dance of therapists is into and out of the skin of others. How Superman's true heroism is revealed. These are poems worthy of a long-term friendship.
-Len Anderson, author of Invented by the Night
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Dane Cervine explores with a keen poet's eye the borderlands where the doctor meets the mystic, the adult meets the child he once was, the beauty and pain of life become indistinguishable. Deliciously full of joy, insight, and awe, Cervine's poetry certainly shows you how therapists dance.
- Ellen Bass, author of The Human Line
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Dane Cervine often lets a wry humor open the door to a deeper place. His light stroke sets the reader at ease, invites us into "the mischief in the young boy's fiddle," the "almost tangible, humming in the air between us" where, even through sadness and hardship "a blue dragonfly whirs" and we come to know we are "wide enough, finally, for every jagged thing." His finely-wrought poems are a comfort and a compass.
-Patrice Vecchione, author of Writing and the Spiritual Life and a poetry collection, The Knot Untied
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While Dane Cervine's first book, The Jeweled Net of Indra, was woven with themes related to social justice and our larger connection with each other, this new book is flavored with the act of "attention" shared by the triune influences of his work: therapy, meditation, and poetry. Dane Cervine's poems are at once disciplined, sturdy, compassionate and wise. And there's an inspired playfulness, as in these lines from his poem "Enlightenment Is a Bitch":
...even fire hydrants with their red stubby arms become mandalas, and worse, the police siren revving its wail behind/my slow-moving car sounds like a mantra...
-Robert Sward, author of New & Selected Poems, 1957-2012
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Regarding the poem "Accordions & Shotguns," a finalist for the Wabash:
The sheer volume of information in this poem is impressive-which is to say that all that story is fluently delivered to the reader-but it is really the passion and precision of the final stanza that earns my full attention.
--Tony Hoagland
