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Now Do You Know Where You Are is a book about many things-Donald Trump, climate grief, the Covid pandemic, the death of a cat–but it's also the diary of a poet's painful passage from not writing to writing again. Levin freely shares the self-doubts, false starts and dead ends of her return to poetry in this unguarded literary experiment. If this sounds emotionally risky and artistically gutsy, it is."–
Srikanth Reddy, New York Times, Editor's Choice"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 is the modern-day master of the em-dash."–
New York Times Magazine
"Dana Levin channels the collective pandemic subconscious and Trump-era bewilderment in these jagged, jumpy poems that ponder 'the question / of whether this world, which I prefer to think of in the past / tense, will flourish.' She's good company during the days' dark hours but holds out hope that we may yet save ourselves if only we can communicate and 'change goes viral.'"–
NPR, "Best Books of 2022""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 "Her sly poems interrogate the most profound questions of human life while staying rooted to the concrete language of ordinary experience. . . . The last poem, 'Now Do You Know Where You Are, ' begins, 'It is another way of saying WAKE UP.' That's exactly the effect this collection will exercise on readers."–
Ron Charles, Washington Post"[Levin] highlights the sacrosanct importance of connection with others and the world, how fragile each of us is individually and how dependent we are on each other to find our place in the world and society. Addressing [C.D. Wright] as 'Spirit I only met once, ' Levin leaves us with this thought: that our lives are inextricable from one another, whether we meet in passing, only once, or not at all."–
Los Angeles Review of Books
"Time doesn't merely pass but replicates itself–these poems simulate how, exactly, the poet struggles with and through her intermittent silence. . . The poet makes progress, and this slow return gives everyone–poet and reader–the time to think about sudden change; to feel and articulate 'how some things you are happy to see again / when you return, // like the sea'; to return by any means necessary to the impossible beginning."–
Ploughshares"For several decades, Levin's poetry has been as consistent as it has been important in American letters. Her fifth collection carries the emotional and lyrical torch of its predecess