Now Do You Know Where You Are

Book excerpt: “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?’” “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