Banana Palace

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. [em](Oct.) [/em]