Now Do You Know Where You Are

Reviews

“Dana Levin is the modern-day master of the em-dash.” —New York Times Magazine

“She 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 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

“Levin’s poetry collection is about many things—Donald Trump, climate grief, the Covid pandemic—but it’s also the diary of the poet’s painful passage from not writing to writing again: an unguarded literary experiment that freely shares her self-doubts, false starts and dead ends.” —New York Times, 100 Notable Books of 2022

“Written between the dawn and dusk of the Trump presidency, 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. From telling the story of her own birth, to her sessions with an osteopath who calls himself an ‘Incarnation Specialist,’ to grief over putting down a beloved cat, to her reflections on the history of the world . . . she writes with profound self-awareness, spinning experience into meditations on how to exist. The answer is uncertain, but this terrific book will ground readers in the art of questioning, even as the ground quakes.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“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’s “Best Books of 2022”

“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 predecessors, and while there are poems that illuminate aspects of the effects of the pandemic, this is by no means a collection that’s simply a reaction to it. Rather, it is an extension of the thoughts and feelings when one becomes increasingly aware, skeptical, and accepting of the dangers present in plain sight.” —The Adroit Journal

“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.” —McSweeney’s 

“…her confident yet searching point of view compels. Combined with her attention to matters of sound and craft, the poems in Now make memorable music.” — The Brooklyn Rail

“Frank and gorgeously crafted poems . . . a poet ever aware of the split between the bag of meat and the animating spirit.” —Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation

“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.”       —New York Times Editor’s Choice

“Investigating a broad emotional, political, and literary landscape, from climate devastation to the global pandemic, Trump’s tweets to Google’s memory, Levin calls on beloveds and ancestors, great thinkers and religions to piece together a map of existence.” —Poets & Writers

“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.” —Washington Post

“Levin has written a book of adjustments—one that nearly resembles a sort of Delphic handbook on the transformation of self-concept. The speakers’ idea of self, whether viewed by the private “I,” the public “friend,” or the cosmic “god,” is being worked out on every page and with every poem. . . . Through these adjustments, and the speakers’ remarkable honesty about them, Levin has shared how the magic of self-criticism (when used properly—handle with care!) and self-reflection can transform your life in millions of tiny but crucial ways.” —New York Journal 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

“There may never be a definitive collection about what it was like to be a poet during the Trump years, but Levin’s book is a good start.” —California Review of Books

“Levin is one of my favorite contemporary poets, and her new book is one of her best — a complex portrait of what it’s like to live in contemporary America, which I feel I will be learning from for years to come.” —The Week

“Whether she’s contemplating mortality, misogyny, social struggle, or time’s relentless passage, Levin anchors her discussion with a down-to-earth sensibility. . . . Even as it lofts us on high to see the warp and weft of the universe and our own troubled place therein, this collection turns out to be a strangely reassuring read. A satisfying work from an accomplished poet.” —Library Journal

“Full of insightful reflection and lyric beauty, the kind that seems to reflect a process of writing undertaken by someone attempting to make sense of tragedy, someone who feels powerful emotions that demand to be put down on paper. Through the collection, familiar St. Louis scenes provide a backdrop for this process, with Levin, who lives and teaches there, visiting the graves of Tennessee Williams, Kate Chopin, and Dred Scott, then walking through Forest Park and stopping into Schnucks in the course of one poem. Levin also renders the scenery of her former home of New Mexico in this collection, and the two settings create something like magnetic poles for the poems contained here. . . . When you read a collection like Now Do You Know Where You Are by Dana Levin, you look upon the most vexing questions of our time in parallax with the author, and you know at least that as you read the words and think of frightening, terrible things, you are not alone.” —Missouri Life

“In a clear struggle with displacement in a new city, with a new president, and a sense of foreboding, Levin’s speaker looks to various spiritual guides to inform and divine her life journey. This speaker, a slightly cynical spiritual messenger, makes a perfect companion for unsettling times.” —Poetry Northwest