"The / drugs, the page, none of it is here. That was years ago," Daniel Barban Levin writes in his debut collection of poems, trying to create an inventory of blank spaces, to describe the persistent presence -- the psychological furniture -- of what no longer exists. "There was a room. I lived there. / Now, I can't find it anymore."
Written in the wake of the media storm surrounding the revelation of the Sarah Lawrence cult, interrogating the constructs of confessionalism and journalistic epistemology after the release of memoirs and viral articles and a Hulu docu-series, Worms, Dirt considers the soil beneath the story playing out aboveground. These poems are a unique telling of two kinds of departure - leaving a cult and exiting a relationship. They weave together fragments and elisions of memory -- "Was any of it right? Did any of it happen the way / You remembered?" -- reverse engineering a story from the aftermath -- "The piece you still can't find. It must be true. He was // Gentle. Sometimes, he was gentle." Devastating and open-hearted, these pages transcribe transformation and reconstruction of self, survival, reckoning. They confront the intimate betrayals of belonging to a high-control group or seeking love from the wrong romantic relationships. These lyrics confront horror and a fragile hope in their recognition of this inconceivable thing, the soft flesh smothered by the scar: "The hands' capacity / For gentleness even as you watched them, in disbelief, dismantle you."
Traversing New York and New Hampshire and landing in Los Angeles, Levin treats the things we leave behind as the material from which we grow. Most striking about Worms, Dirt is its lyrical metacommentary -- as a book about writing a book, it constantly refuses the constraints of the imposed narrative memoir and the parasitic appetite for sensationalism, easily commodified true crime, and flattening characterizations of victims and villains. "For I am at work, writing this / For I have accrued so many reasons to live."
About the Author :
Levin is the author of Slonim Woods 9 (Crown, 2021), described by Nylon as "extraordinary, biting, observant," a memoir that vividly recounts his experience as a survivor of a college cult and offers a profound exploration of manipulation, resilience, and recovery. He produced the Hulu docuseries Stolen Youth, which unflinchingly depicted the tragic consequences of coercive control and the remarkable resilience of its survivors. His essays and poems have appeared in Provincetown Arts, Psychology Today, and numerous other publications, and he has spoken and taught widely on the power of poetry, memoir, mental health, trauma recovery, and the psychology of coercion for both national media--including Radiolab--and classrooms across the country. Levin lives in Los Angeles.
Review :
As its title might suggest, Worms, Dirt is a book of digging and probing--a book that's not afraid to get its hands dirty. It's a book of emerging from the chrysalis of trauma into a new life. It's a bracing document of becoming. Levin has a terrific ability to grab details from the natural world and shape them into tools he uses to chip away at the human predicament. He writes about family pathology and other harms with astonishing equanimity and wit. I love Worms, Dirt's alert, candid, vulnerable poems. They beautifully counterpoint self-reflection, intuition and a living sense of proliferating, shifting, wriggling, multi-faceted truths.
--Amy Gerstler
Daniel Barban Levin has questions: how to live in spite of and because of the world, how to perceive one's life knowing it has also been portrayed for a time in the glaring, selective light of the news. In Worms, Dirt he demonstrates possible answers: one can live (and write) with humor, honesty, grace, imagination. These poems pick me up from my usual train of thought and set me down on one going somewhere totally new. It's a miraculous ride.
--Heather Christle
