Banana Palace

Banana Palace

<div><p>"Images that are satisfyingly clear . . . and excitingly inexplicable." —Robert Pinsky, <I>Washington Post</I></p><p>"Intimate and hypnotic . . . whether turning her gaze inward or outward, these poems question the moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical needs that poetry exists to fill." —<I>Ploughshares </I></p><p>"Levin's work is phenomenological; it details how it feels to be an embodied consciousness making its way through the world." —<I>Boston Review</I></p><p>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.</p><p><I>It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.</I></p><p><I>Cross-section of a banana under a microscope<BR>the caption read.</I></p><p><I>I hunched around my little screen<BR>sharing a fruit no one could eat.</I></p><p><B>Dana Levin</B> has published three books of poetry, <I>Wedding Day</I> (Copper Canyon), <I>Sky Burial</I> (Copper Canyon), and her first book, <I>In the Surgical Theatre</I>, won the APR/Honickman Award. A teacher of poetry for over twenty years, Levin splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence.</p></div>