Dream Apartment - by Lisa Olstein (Paperback)

About the Book

"A collection of poems by Lisa Olstein"--

Book Synopsis

In Dream Apartment, Lisa Olstein builds a world of night-rabbits, bodiless shadows, and networks of wind where ode and elegy meet.

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."

Review Quotes

Praise for Dream Apartment

"Despite the title, the poems in Pushcart Prize and Hayden Carruth Award winner Olstein's latest collection are not dreamlike so much as they resemble the process of dreaming. They observe the way one part of a dream segues to another and the way a dream applies to and differs from daily life. . . . [They] work their magic through just such a sequential movement."--Diane Scharper, Library Journal

"Elegiac for both self and species, Dream Apartment names, as a title, the overlapping and inter-animation of interior and exterior structures. Through brilliant enjambment, agile movement, textural acoustics, and rhythmic mastery, Olstein delivers a skilled yet deeply felt portrait of existential and ecological extinction, making the book an important marker of a shift from 'weird' to 'worldly, ' from 'ludic' to 'lucid.'"--Preposition Mag

"A formal restlessness echoes the particularities of this mind at work. Olstein moves between haibuns, short-lined enjambments, and concrete poems shaped like arrows. Sonic riffs propel the collection: vessel morphs into vassal, plum meets plumb as sound shapes the mind's momentum. Wit, word play, and tonal shifts abound."--Rebecca Morgan Frank, Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation

"There is such an interesting shift in tone, rhythm, and effect through her evolution of lyric structures, one that allows for the larger shape of the collection to emerge out of shared purpose amid myriad structures. . . . Each shape and patter attends uniquely to the music of each line, offering a precise and dreamy effect through her examinations, and even negotiations, on how one lives or might live in the world."--Rob McLennan's Blog

"Into this surfeit of mind-numbing meaning comes Olstein, clear eyed, to restore the dignity of the quarrel with oneself. Olstein is a nimble post-modernist, afraid neither of the couplet nor the broken line on a scattershot page."--Johnny Payne, Merion West

Praise for Lisa Olstein

"An accomplished poet, she often uses language beautifully and inventively."--New York Times Book Review

"Is she just smarter about syntax, more articulate about human drama, more imaginative about eeriness, more insightful about sadness, more capable of turning a novel phrase, more engaging a storyteller than nearly all the rest of her peers? Well, yes."--The Huffington Post

"Tenderness, then, is a form of resistance. It allows Olstein to create intimacy on the page not only among those who inhabit these poems, but also in those of us reading them. . . . With this book, Olstein has declared herself a poet worth watching"--The Rumpus

"Brilliant and provocative . . . Olstein realizes that the rules of language must be questioned, interrogated, and revised from within."--The Literary Review

"Taut, sonically driven and darkly funny."--The Volta

"This poet brings a sparkling consciousness to the page."--Library Journal

About the Author

Lisa Olstein is the author of five poetry collections--Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, Lost Alphabet, Little Stranger, Late Empire, and Dream Apartment. Her non-fiction includes Pain Studies, a book-length lyric essay, and Climate, an exchange of epistolary essays with the poet Julie Carr. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Residency Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Hayden Carruth Award, Sustainable Arts Fellowship, and Writers League of Texas Book Award, Olstein teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center MFA programs at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite and serves as an associate editor at Tupelo Quarterly.