"Utterly her own, and utterly riveting." The New Yorker Dana Levin, in her fourth collection, Banana Palace, confronts the deep anxieties of our age with bemusement, incredulity, outrage, and hope. Observing the crisis of human appetite through the lenses of psychology and science fiction, she's disquieted at a world "ruled by a bi-polar father-god, unconscious, suicidal." The personal meets the collective in these poems: insane rants transform into contemporary oracular speech; a child who once hoarded candy grows into an adult who consumes a planet. Mutation, social media, eco-collapse, a dream of a survivable End Times: no less than the future of the body is at stake, bodies corporeal and political, ecological and spiritual. Was that the soul, wishing we would invent the body out of existence, so many of us now enthralled by doom... 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 University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence.