Description

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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."

About the Author

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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.