Now Do You Know Where You Are

Author: Levin, Dana
Publication date: 02/06/2022
Imprint: Copper Canyon Press US
Pages: 96
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781556596339

Previously selected for major prizes by Nobel prize-winning poet Louise Gluck

Levin’s book are consistently well reviewed and critically-acclaimed

Has published with Copper Canyon Press since her debut in 1999

This particular book has many poems sparked, informed, or reshaped by the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath

The book hinges upon the poet’s move from Santa Fe to St. Louis

Memoir hybrid: personal meditations on the body, grief, and place

Poems about the poet’s own medical and homeopathic history

The book revolves around three key sequences: \”Two Autumns, Saint Louis,\” \”Pledge,\” and \”Appointment\”-the first two are very much poems \”about\” America/place post-election, and \”Appointment\” is very much about healing and the body


Review Quotes:
\” 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

\”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