Worms, Dirt

“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 ep...