REALIGNMENT: On the chiropractor's table, a poet comes to terms with trauma

Excerpt from a review by Srikanth Reddy of “How Do You Know Where You Are”: Poems by Dana Levin, in the New York Times Book Review, April 17.

…..(Levin variously) attempts to find a way out of her literary PTSD. She tries writing exercises; she tries yoga; she tries visiting the grave of Dred Scott - with mixed results. So it’s quite exhilarating when, toward the book’s end, the poet finds her truest muse in the unlikeliest of places, on a chiropractor’s table:

Jensen cracked my recalcitrant neck
and I felt, finally, that I was fully
facing the can’t-see of the future-,

More shaman than chiropractor, Jensen populates his office with “the spirit figures you’d find in any American neo-pagan household.” Levin wryly observes, “of which there were so many in Santa Fe, including mine.” His worktable resembles a wrestling mat or a lover’s bed, a site of intense physicality and intimacy:

He muttered in tongues, when he
worked on me. It was no language I
could recognize. I never asked about
it…

Sometimes he would push a finger into
the pit of my deepest scar.

He held me..

Jensen pushed down hard on my
clavicles on either side of my neck as
I wept -

He said, This is what the earth is doing,
we have to get ready -