Dana Levin
“And poetry, one of the reasons why it's such a subversive art form is that it has the capacity to really ask you to just slow down, and be with your discomfort and your uncertainty and your not knowing and your confusion...”
REad
WATCH
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Dana Levin is the modern-day master of the em dash.”
“Reading a Dana Levin poem is a bit like spelunking into a cave of golden light in which there is a reverse disco ball that turns in synch to the beat of your heart.”
Dana Levin is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Now Do You Know Where You Are (2022), a New York Times Notable Book and NPR “Book We Love.” Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005, and in 2011 Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Banana Palace, published in 2016, was a finalist for the Rilke Prize.
Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poetry. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Lannan, Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. With Adele Elise Williams, she co-edited Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master (2023) for the Unsung Masters Series.
Levin currently serves as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis, where she lives.
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