Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep

by Sandra Huber

Even though we spend a third of our lives asleep, the behaviour remains largely a mystery. Sandra Huber’s first book, Assembling the A Poetics of Sleep , assumes that any attempt to solve this mystery requires new modes of experimentation. What happens when the line of a Berger’s wave (an electroencephalography recording of brainwaves in sleep) turns into a line of poetry, an act of focused consciousness? The earliest readings of the sleeping brain, captured by EEGs in the 1930s, revealed that sleep is as active and lively as its daytime counterpart, not simply a passive state that naturally ensues when wakefulness ceases. Sleep not only assimilates the day that’s passed, but also looks forward, assembling what’s to come. To engage this concept, Huber sculpts a long poem onto the neural oscillations of sleep, in order to explore what is beneath them the conscious organism, the writer, and the written. In the field of the poem, where sleep is traditionally a metaphor for death, the idea that to be awake is to be alive is put to the test in a new kind of writing that invites a new kind of being. Prefaced by a discussion on poetry, the science of sleep, and those who have sought a language of consciousness – from Hans Berger to Gertrude Stein – Assembling the Morrow proposes that entering the mystery of sleep requires a radical reframing of our biases on what it means to be conscious.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 14, 2014

Reviews

[Lea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of all, this book lit up my imagination and curiosity for the experience of sleep. I am left wondering if some part of my brain right now is actually sleeping.

The first part of the book, The Room, meanders into and through the sleep stages, planted with peripheral science and poetry, and keeps moving forward. The playful pushing of language out of its normal presentation is for good use.

The middle of the book (“the poeming of the graph”) is an artistic representation of the EEG line. The pages fold out of the book in a long line, printed on both sides, on a seemingly satin and durable quality of paper.

The final part of the book, The Line, are the lines used to make the foldout poem. They are repetitive motion-making lines, Gertrude Stein-esque. Huber says there was approximately 24 minutes written, making some 300 pages, of which just over 2 minutes are presented.