The Account

This poetry collection opens with an epigraph on the importance of the past in forming the present self and directing it into the future. The poems chart the growth, development, and transitions of various aspects of their speakers' selves--ethnic, religious, familial, social, geographic. Through free and formal verse, through short lyrics and the long narrative poem "Wandering Home," Levine's speakers explore and offer their accounts of who, how, and why they are, have been, and are becoming.