Now Do You Know Where You Are

"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