Dana Levin’s first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was awarded the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive nearly every award available to first books and emerging poets. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005 and Sky Burial in 2011, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Sky Burial was noted for 2011 year-end honors by The New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, Coldfront, and Library Journal. Her most recent book, Banana Palace, will be released in 2016. Levin has received numerous fellowships and awards, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. Her poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, Poetry and The Arcadia Project. A teacher of creative writing and literature for over twenty years, Levin has served as the Russo Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at University of New Mexico (2009-2011) and currently co-chairs the Creative Writing and Literature Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
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Wedding DayPoemsFrom"Ars Poetica"
Six monarch butterfly cocoons
Clinging to the back of your throat –
you could feel their gold wings trembling.
You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
gagging to spit them out –
and a voice saying, Don’t, don’t –
Wedding Day:Poems -
Wedding DayPoemsFrom"Suttee"
Do you want Batman or Spider-Man.
Do you want the wizard hat or Professor X, the green skull
with a rose in its teeth, do you want
the thunderbolt or the smiley face.
George Washington with spirals for eyes.
Wedding Day:Poems -
Wedding DayPoemsFrom"The Washing"
Get down on your knees and look in.
Bring yourself close and look in.
A’s and B’s, upglistening like fish.
Upglistening and then lifting
over the pool.
Ahh, Behh, breath over water in the air around you,
what will you bathe. Throat-Stander,
in the song’s black pool?
Wedding Day:Poems
“Sky Burial brings a wealth of rituals and lore from various strains of Buddhism, as well as Mesoamerican and other spiritual traditions, but the intensity and seriousness and openness of her investigations make Levin’s use of this material utterly her own, and utterly riveting.” —The New Yorker
“In Levin’s hands the fragment becomes a tool of regeneration and self-understanding. It’s as if the very idea of the sentence has to be rethought from the beginning.” —The Boston Review [on Sky Burial]
"Intimate and hypnotic, the poems of Levin's wonderful second book operate as a lens through which we are simultaneously granted two views: one into the darker, private interior of the self, the other of an outer-world turned otherworldly by the poet's eye. Whether turning her gaze inward or outward, these poems question the moral, aesthetic, and metaphysic needs that poetry exists to fulfill; Levin posits a lovely and revelatory analogy when she likens the 'American poet' to '[a] cricket trilling endlessly against the din of traffic. / Inaudible, unless you stood right at the spot where it lodged itself in a little crack between the walk and the wall . . . legg[ing] the air ceaselessly where no one could hear it.'" —Ploughshares [on Wedding Day]
Selected Works
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