Dana Levin reading at Smith College

In Dana Levin’s Banana Palace (Copper Canyon, 2016), the act of scrolling through a cellphone becomes linked with a sibyl’s prophetic voice and an overheard rant on the street swirls with the force of the oracular. In Levin’s work, this collision of voices becomes a means of interrogating the complex collage of information and human desires in an era that seems wracked with political and global anxieties. These are urgent and inventive poems, determined equally to confront the vicissitudes of our age as well as the interiority of the self. Dana Levin has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Library of Congress and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as a distinguished writer in residence.