To Speak While Dreaming

REVIEWS

"The path i talk about leads from the other side/ of jailed or crazy or disable/ who scared me when they grimaced/ thru the chainlink/ there to spread out across & to dream/ while speaking."

This handsomely produced book presents the poet as sibyl--to speak while dreaming--the words coming through her and settling on the page still vibrating and with all the motion and music intact. She writes deftly and sensually of love(s) moving across the (American) landscape; the poems, with thoroughly modern rhythms, linebreaks and enjambment, hint towards classical mythology--ripe with Eros--and lay it over a foundation of the parting lot and the Indian Reservation. The space she creates evokes a whole tradition of poets including Anselm Hollo, Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger; a series of openform sonnets are in the lineage of Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. Filled with both vision and music, indebted to but not enslaved by Naropa poetics. —Jeff Conant