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 reviewDana 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?'""Dana Levin is the modern-day master of the em-dash."--New York Times
Magazine
"The book weaves in and out of prose, and it's no wonder
that the haibun is the generative form in these pages. A form invented by Basho
so that he could move from the prose of his travelogues to the quick
intensities of haiku, back and forth. Emily Dickinson does the same thing in
her letters. And because this is a poet of the western United States--born outside
of Los Angeles and raised in the Mojave, then two decades in Santa Fe, now in
middle America, St. Louis--maybe it's right to think of her work in terms of
storm clouds: if the prose is an anvil cloud, the flash of poetry at the
end is lightning."--Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's