Dana Levin's fifth collection is a brave and perceptive companion, walking with the reader through the disorientations of personal and collective transformation. Now Do You Know Where You Are investigates how great change calls the soul out of the old lyric, "to be a messenger--to record whatever wanted to stream through."
In her newest collection, Dana Levin uses humor, jump-cut imagery, and popular culture references in preparation for the approaching apocalypse. Against a backdrop of Facebook, cat memes, and students searching their smartphones for a definition of the soul, Levin draws upon a culture of limited attention spans as it searches for greater spiritual meaning. The poems in Banana Palace are elliptical by design, the lines often trailing off into a white space of their own making, as if flirting with and resolving in their own isolation.
A doctor contemplates Lenin's embalmed body; two angels flank an open chest during a heart transplant; a father's anger turns into a summer thunderstorm . . . Each of Levin's poems is an astonishing investigation of human darkness, propelled by a sensuous syntax and a desire for healing.
"This is the language of a prophet: Levin's art, in this book certainly, takes place in a kind of mutating day of judgment: it means to wipe a film from our eyes. It is a dare, a challenge, and, for all its considerable beauty, the opposite of the seductive . . . Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels." —Louise Gluck, from the Introduction
"Death is the new and unshakeable lens through which I see," writes Dana Levin about her third book, in which she confronts mortality and loss in subjects ranging from Tibetan Buddhist burial practices to Aztec human sacrifice. Shaped by dreams and "the worms and the gods," these poems are a profound investigation of our inescapable fate. As Louise Glück has said: "Levin's animating fury goes back deeper into our linguistic and philosophic history: to Blake's tiger, to the iron judgments of the Old Testament."
