New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022

NPR Best Books of 2022

Levin's luminous latest reckons with the disorientation of contemporary America. . . . Through the fog of doubt, Levin summons ferocious intellect and musters hard-won clairvoyance.-Publishers Weekly, starred review

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. Levin works in a variety of forms, calling
on beloveds and ancestors, great thinkers and religions―convened by Levin's own
spun-of-light wisdom and intellectual hospitality―balancing clear-eyed
forensics of the past with vatic knowledge of the future. So many bodies a
soul has to press through: personal, familial, regional, national, global,
planetary, cosmic― // 'Now do you know where you are?'

Images that are satisfyingly clear . . . and excitingly inexplicable. --Robert Pinsky, Washington Post

Intimate and hypnotic . . . whether turning her gaze inward or outward, these poems question the moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical needs that poetry exists to fill. --Ploughshares

Levin's work is phenomenological; it details how it feels to be an embodied consciousness making its way through the world. --Boston Review

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.

It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.

Cross-section of a banana under a microscope
the caption read.

I hunched around my little screen
sharing a fruit no one could eat.

Dana Levin has published three books of poetry, Wedding Day (Copper Canyon), Sky Burial (Copper Canyon), and her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, won the APR/Honickman Award. A teacher of poetry for over twenty years, Levin splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence.

An urgent, magnetic collection of poems which attempt to understand and heal human darkness.

After suffering three deaths in her family, Levin was prompted to write Sky Burial

From Ars Poetica

Six monarch butterfly cocoons
clinging to the back of your throat--
you could feel their gold wings trembling. . .

Dana Levin's singular voice and talent are unmistakable. Wedding Day is Levin's quest to synthesize the public and private, to find pattern and connection amid the disparate elements of modern life. Relentless in her examinations, she ultimately puts faith in poetry, believing it is the truest means--and best chance--to bridge the chasms between soul and society. Readers will put faith in Levin's poetry as well.

Dana Levin grew up in California's Mojave Desert. Her debut volume, In the Surgical Theatre, received nearly every honor available for first books and emerging writers. Other honors include fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe and Whiting Foundations. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, Levin chairs the Creative Writing and Literature Department at College of Santa Fe in Sante Fe, New Mexico

From Library Journal

For her debut collection, In the Surgical Theatre, Levin (creative writing, Coll. of Santa Fe) won the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares; it's no wonder, then, that her follow-up has been anticipated by academic scholars and poetry lovers, who won't be disappointed. While her first work focused on the gritty details of physical matter, often its desecration or decay, Levin's current work offers insight into the most personal and unspoken thoughts that can be easily overlooked: we were losing our bodies/ digitized salt of bytes and speed we were becoming a powder/ light/ bicarbonate/ what we might have seen, if we had looked. Her voice speaks to the private wars of self and the dark violence of reflection. Readers will find that this work carries the pulse of their darkest sorrows, in the breath of their humanity. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.--April Davis, STG International, NIST, Oakotn, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information

intimate and hyponotic...whether turning her gaze inward or outward, these poems question the moral, aesthetic, and metaphysic needs that poetry exists to fill.

--Ploughshares

Dana Levin's poems are extravagant...her mind keeps making unexpected connections and the poems push beyond convention...they surprise us.

--LA Times

Images that are satisfyingly clear...and excitingly inexplicable

--Robert Pinsky, Washington Post