What do you think?
Rate this book
Mulholland Dive
“It was the year us girls had a feminine desire to go missing,” Vanessa Roveto, acclaimed author of bodys, begins her book within the remnants of a car crash, fragmenting identity, grief, and heart.
Beginning with the death of daddy, the “I” soon meshes with whatever and whomever she comes into contact with—strangers, actors, a Covid crush. She absorbs these people and objects, dispersing them into the Southern California landscape, the Uncanny Valley, warping time and naturalizing dreams.
Documenting a period of both global and personal loss, Roveto crafts a book-length poem that weighs heavier than the Ego in L.A. Splintering Self between Other and palm trees in the summer heat, Mulholland Dive spins a Lynchian setting within a feminine eruption of alluring language, fluked romance, and the aftershocks of grief.
Beginning with the death of daddy, the “I” soon meshes with whatever and whomever she comes into contact with—strangers, actors, a Covid crush. She absorbs these people and objects, dispersing them into the Southern California landscape, the Uncanny Valley, warping time and naturalizing dreams.
Documenting a period of both global and personal loss, Roveto crafts a book-length poem that weighs heavier than the Ego in L.A. Splintering Self between Other and palm trees in the summer heat, Mulholland Dive spins a Lynchian setting within a feminine eruption of alluring language, fluked romance, and the aftershocks of grief.
- GenresPoetry
100 pages, Paperback
Published August 5, 2025
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 25, 2024
perfect. much better than the michael connolly version. more artistic too.
December 29, 2025
Reads like a patchwork of meandering drunk texts.
December 12, 2025
really toed the line between experimental prose poetry and word salad, and unfortunately ended up more in the camp of the latter
August 21, 2025
Roveto’s poetry is riveting — like living in a dreamscape that’s still very much grounded in reality. I took my time with this collection, soaking up her turns of phrase, and her dedication to get her readers to re-think about the meaning we’ve societally ascribed onto certain words. I will be returning to this prose poem novella collection time and again!
April 24, 2026
“an italian by birth the director asked that she was drenched in her own pasta sauce but i had misplaced the pot.”
A collection of poetry with packaging designed in a lab to trick me into buying it, you cannot shade Fiona Apple with writing like this.
A collection of poetry with packaging designed in a lab to trick me into buying it, you cannot shade Fiona Apple with writing like this.
October 5, 2026
this is some really great prose poetry. it's very subversive in terms of traditional literary structure, as it's entirely non-linear, fragmented, words appear nonsensically glued together, etc.
to me, though, it's meant to be written much like lynch's mulholland drive is meant to be watched. you get a blob that represents plot and ideas, but it's ultimately up to the consumer to give the blob shape. it's built on connotative and associative language. if you attempt to understand everything at face value using pure diction and linearity, it's easy to feel lost. but if you allow the words to subliminally steep and bubble, you'll naturally build a rough, fuzzy sketch of everything written between the lines.
this is crucial for the book. it creates this dreamy, hypnogogic, hazy tone (again, much like any david lynch movie) where you simply get lost in its ideas. you'll get this awesome text on sexuality, grief, isolation, identity confusion, societal confinements especially from the feminine perspective. in this way, the form of the text mirrors the psychology of the themes.
to me, though, it's meant to be written much like lynch's mulholland drive is meant to be watched. you get a blob that represents plot and ideas, but it's ultimately up to the consumer to give the blob shape. it's built on connotative and associative language. if you attempt to understand everything at face value using pure diction and linearity, it's easy to feel lost. but if you allow the words to subliminally steep and bubble, you'll naturally build a rough, fuzzy sketch of everything written between the lines.
this is crucial for the book. it creates this dreamy, hypnogogic, hazy tone (again, much like any david lynch movie) where you simply get lost in its ideas. you'll get this awesome text on sexuality, grief, isolation, identity confusion, societal confinements especially from the feminine perspective. in this way, the form of the text mirrors the psychology of the themes.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews