Worms, Dirt

Daniel Barban Levin

“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.” 

Memoir

I opened the door and watched myself
                  taking a bath. “I look sad,” I said. Nothing had
Happened, not yet. I saw through

                  my past. The book I was bound to write,
I’d already written it. I shook it above my head.

                  The answers fluttered out
Like every apology
                  no one’s ever received.

I’m on the approach, a camera
                  imitating vertigo, pulling away

While zooming in close. A something white, uncertain,
                  melting from the surface like foam or snow.
The room overflows with déjà vu.

                  I wanted to erase someone from my memory.
I can’t for the life of me remember who.