“Restlessness, Reflection & Revolution”: Dana Levin, Jana Prikryl & Jenny Xie

Carlene Sawyer is the executive director of the Dranoff International 2 Piano Foundation, managing and overseeing the funding, production, and artistic integrity of Dranoff’s programs and the advancement of the Dranoff International 2 Piano Competition. She is also the creator and producer of Dranoff’s Piano Slam, the Foundation’s performance and education program, which has recently brought live music, poetry, and dance to more than 60,000 teenage students.

Dana Levin’s fifth book is Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon, 2022), a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Recent books include Banana Palace and Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Her poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry, and The Yale Review, among other publications. She is a grateful recipient of honors from the NEA, PEN, the Library of Congress, and the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin serves as distinguished writer in residence at Maryville University in St. Louis. Now Do You Know Where You Are is a companion, walking with the reader through the disorientations of personal and collective transformation. It investigates how great change calls the soul out of the old lyric “to be a messenger – to record whatever wanted to stream through.” Levin works in various forms, calling on beloveds and ancestors, great thinkers, and religions – convened by Levin’s own spun-of-light wisdom and intellectual hospitality – balancing clear-eyed forensics of the past with vatic knowledge of the future.

Jana Prikryl was born in the Czech Republic and moved to Canada at the age of 6. She works as an editor at The New York Review of Books and is the author of three books of poems: Midwood (W. W. Norton & Company), No Matter, and The After Party. In Midwood, her latest collection, Prikryl probes the notion of midlife, a space in which past and future blur in equidistance. Balancing formal innovation with deeply personal reflection, Midwood subtly but irreverently explores love, sex, marriage, and motherhood in plain, urgent language. Written for the most part early every morning over a year in all its changing seasons, Midwood includes a series of poems looking at and talking to trees. Prikryl’s careful attention to the ordinary world outside the window forms an alternative measure of time. With their rapid shifts of scale and unusual directness, these poems find a new language for confronting our moment.

Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level, winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the National Book Award, and Nowhere to Arrive. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the New Republic, Tin House, and elsewhere. Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense: Poems (Graywolf Press), Xie’s second collection, notes what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. She cracks open reverberant experiences of diasporic homecoming, state-enforced amnesia, intergenerational memory, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged. The Rupture Tense begins with poems sparked by the photography of Li Zhensheng. His negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The arc of the collection ends on an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end of the revolution.