Synopsis "Now do you Know Where you are"
"Levin'sluminous latest reckons with the disorientation of contemporary America. . . .Through the fog of doubt, Levin summons ferocious intellect and mustershard-won clairvoyance."--PublishersWeekly, starred reviewDana Levin's fifth collection is a brave and perceptivecompanion, walking with the reader through the disorientations of personal andcollective transformation. Now Do You Know Where You Are investigates how greatchange calls the soul out of the old lyric, "to be a messenger―to recordwhatever wanted to stream through." Levin works in a variety of forms, callingon beloveds and ancestors, great thinkers and religions―convened by Levin's ownspun-of-light wisdom and intellectual hospitality―balancing clear-eyedforensics of the past with vatic knowledge of the future. "So many bodies asoul 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 TimesMagazine "The book weaves in and out of prose, and it's no wonderthat the haibun is the generative form in these pages. A form invented by Bashoso that he could move from the prose of his travelogues to the quickintensities of haiku, back and forth. Emily Dickinson does the same thing inher letters. And because this is a poet of the western United States--born outsideof Los Angeles and raised in the Mojave, then two decades in Santa Fe, now inmiddle America, St. Louis--maybe it's right to think of her work in terms ofstorm clouds: if the prose is an anvil cloud, the flash of poetry at theend is lightning."--Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's
