"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
