Now Do You Know Where You Are

Dana Levin

Forthcoming April 2022

Dana Levin’s fifth collection is a brave and perceptive companion, walking with the reader through the disorientations of personal and collective transformation. Written between 2016 and 2020, Now Do You Know Where You Are investigates how great change calls the soul out “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 her own spun-of-light wisdom and intellectual hospitality. Balancing clear-eyed forensics of the past with vatic knowledge of the future, Levin writes: “So many bodies a soul has to press through: personal, familial, regional, national, global, planetary, cosmic— // ‘Now do you know where you are?’” 

Paperback: $17.00 list price

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ISBN: 9781556596339

Format: Paperback

How to Hold the Heavy Weight of Now

She said, “You just made this gesture with your body—” and
opened her arms as if she could barely fit them around an
enormous ball—

“Make that shape again,” she said, and so I did. “Now let it
change,” she said, and I did—

slowly closing the space between my arms, fingertips converging
until they touched—

I watched my hands turn together, align pinkie-side to pinkie-side,
I watched

my palms open, pushing gently forward, leading my body forward,
I watched them

let a bird go, I watched my hands
       make

       an offering—

About the Author

Dana Levin is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Banana Palace (2016). Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 APR/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.” Sky Burial was noted for 2011 …

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