Banana Palace

September 19, 2016
In her fourth collection, Levin (Sky Burial) digs into the relationship between mind and body at a time when technologies offer expansive powers, and physical bodies seem more inefficient and absurd than ever. In these poems, human bodies hurtle toward crises—ecological and
ethical—like “so much meat born/ every day,” stopping occasionally to think about their responsibilities. Though contemplating consciousness is a classical concern of poetry, these poems feel timely in their particulars: in one, an immortality-seeking billionaire wants to upload his thoughts and live forever; in another, set in a mostly post-body era, the speaker is the subject and spectacle on a talk show simply for breathing and eating. The book weaves between the real present and an uneasy future. Throughout, death seems simultaneously omnipresent and perhaps unimportant. “You will never get death/ out of your system,” Levin writes in “Fortune Cookie.” Her similes do the work of tying together bodies and technology: in a hospital, heads fit “like a flash drive// into the port of a healer’s hands.” At times, computers approach the mystical: “The students peer so deep into their handheld screens they/ look like Diviners.” The world may seem broken, but these poems don’t convey doom—Levin’s clear, grounded language leaves the reader hopeful in the end.

July 1, 2016

As the multi-award-winning Levin (Sky Burial) says in her opening poem, "We had a dream// that we could smash the bars/ of matter and time and/ still be alive," a dream we've held from the time of the world's mythic Cassandras and the invention of writing to the Internet. So what's next? In a series of loose-limbed and inventive poems that have an sf feel, Levin contemplates forthcoming possibilities, worrying about "You, future person" even as she reminds us that we're inescapably faced with a present apocalypse of rising waters and a surfeit of "information about information" that leaves us out of touch. That brings her to our ongoing hunger for transcendent meaning--look at the eighth-century Mayan Lady Xoc, biting a spiked rope "so she could froth up/ the Vision Snake"--and the question of consciousness. Is it an accident of biology, the core of "self, self, self, self," an airiness "somewhere between a cellphone call and teleportation"? Can it be separated from the "meat-suits" that weigh us down? Maybe so, but finally we're embedded in this physical world: "here I'm here," says the cricket--and the final poem--repeatedly. VERDICT Levin's meditations may sound like heavy-duty philosophizing, but actually they're bouncy, engrossing fun, occasionally too sketchy, but definitely an admirable read.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2016
Levin (Sky Burial, 2011) draws on the past but looks to the future in this collection about the complicated nature of the body. The advance of technology is at the forefront as she surges from contemplative ideas about transhumanism ( Was that the soul, wishing / we would invent the body / out of existence ) to an awareness of consumption and how it shapes the future. Complicated ideas on the encroachment of technology soon give way to remorse. This is mythology by way of science fiction, and Levin is half a prophet herself: I get so tired / waiting and waiting for the world to end / . . . so much meat born / every day. Always, she is aware of pitiable future generations ( We broke the world / you're living in ), and with no small amount of regret, she reaches for them across time and space. In the end, this collection, melancholy and darkly humorous, is sorrowfully apocalypticwhatever is coming, Levin doesn't doubt, we did it to ourselves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)