Dream Apartment

Lisa Olstein

Forthcoming September 2023

Devoted equally to the long arc and the sharp fragment, Lisa Olstein’s fifth collection maps the lucid ache at the center of night where “darkness stands in / for light,” certain heartbreaks never end, and love dovetails with losing. Immersed in ode as much as elegy, Dream Apartment employs a dynamic range of forms. Prayer-like spells cascade down the page with precision and abandon. Arrow-shot elegies explore the shock of suicide and find echoes in other kinds of grief—individual and communal, animal and ecological, sudden and creeping. Agile narratives mirror the dazzling associative movement of unselfconscious thought, the dreaming mind, “bodiless memory.” Whether watching a stranger carry his dead dog out of a vet’s exam room or offering bouquets of peonies to night-foraging rabbits, Dream Apartment is propelled by the way poems, like dreams, unfold new dimensions of time and space. Casting their lines toward wish and repair, recognition and reckoning, these poems reveal how any meditation on loss is an exploration of love, promising that in “dreaming, something wakes.”

ISBN: 9781556596742

Format: Paperback

WAYS AND MEANS

A divine spark from an ocean of fire
lights up the vast night in you.

You’re dragging something—
the past? This pathway is open,

that pathway is closed.
Destiny, karma, contracts,

who knows, all of your lifetimes?
Go to the space behind your eyes

that has to do with winter.
Who knows all of your lifetimes?

There. There is your despair.
Bless it with the spark.

About the Author

Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections, Lost Alphabet, Little Stranger, Late Empire, and Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, and a book-length lyric essay, Pain Studies. She is also the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite, a collaboration with the singer-songwriter Jeffrey Foucault. Olstein’s honors include a Lannan Residency, Pushcart Prize, Hayden Carruth Award, Essay Press Chapbook Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Centrum. She co-founded the Juniper Initiative and for ten …

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