Now Do You Know Where You Are

The title of Dana Levin’s new collection, Now Do You Know Where You Are, comes from the poet C.D. Wright, whom Levin aptly calls “a practitioner of deep coordinates,” and the book’s title poem is an elegy addressed to Wright, written on the tenth day of the Trump presidency. The question, so relevant during that disorienting winter, can refer to where one is anchored in time (“—when? A week ago! Eons ago! Ten executive orders ago!”) or in space. 

While grappling with the chaos of Trump’s presidency—“[…] in sleep, I’ve been arguing with fellow travelers about conspiracy versus incompetence”—Levin works with a healer to address lingering pain from the trauma of having been born with Rh disease and enduring drastic neonatal surgery due to treatment complications. She also moves from Santa Fe, New Mexico (“The vast page of its sky!”), to St. Louis, Missouri, where, in “Forest Park”:

You can find bald eagles
        and butterfly weed
and the Angel of the Spirit of the Confederacy

In the poem “About Staircases,” Levin asks, 

Can change be achieved by contesting your position in space? 
The brave ones try it: climbing into trees marked for clear-
cut, refusing to move to the back of the bus. […]

Still, though Levin locates her frank and gorgeously crafted poems, as Wright did, in the “coordinates” of place, history, and body, she seems most at home in a metaphysical space, in the sky, in dreams, a poet “ever aware of the split between the bag of meat and the animating spirit.” In the opening poem, “A Walk in the Park,” Levin weaves an electrifying meditation about reincarnation, facilitated, in Plato’s conception, by a “turning / spindle”:

      […] Necessity
   wheeled it around—Necessity, 
who was married to Time,
   according to the Greeks—
Mother of the Fates.
   Who would measure and cut your

   paradise/shithole extra life …

and her meditation on the cycle of death and birth continues in “Appointment,” a lyric record of Levin’s bodywork, where she considers:

All the little deaths you have to walk through, in order to be born and born and born.