"Images that are satisfyingly clear . . . and excitingly inexplicable." —Robert Pinsky,
Washington Post
"Intimate and hypnotic . . . whether turning her gaze inward or outward, these poems question the moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical needs that poetry exists to fill." —
Ploughshares
"Levin's work is phenomenological; it details how it feels to be an embodied consciousness making its way through the world." —
Boston Review
In her newest collection, Dana Levin uses humor, jump-cut imagery, and popular culture references in preparation for the approaching apocalypse. Against a backdrop of Facebook, cat memes, and students searching their smartphones for a definition of the soul, Levin draws upon a culture of limited attention spans as it searches for greater spiritual meaning. The poems in Banana Palace are elliptical by design, the lines often trailing off into a white space of their own making, as if flirting with and resolving in their own isolation.
It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.
Cross-section of a banana under a microscope
the caption read.
I hunched around my little screen
sharing a fruit no one could eat.
Dana Levin
has published three books of poetry,
Wedding Day
(Copper Canyon),
Sky Burial
(Copper Canyon), and her first book,
In the Surgical Theatre
, won the APR/Honickman Award. A teacher of poetry for over twenty years, Levin splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Maryville Universityin St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence.