Dream Latitudes

by Alia Kobuszko

I am drawing a map of distances.
The swimmer. The sleeper. The dreamer.
Another afternoon traipsing the incomprehensible
corridors of the brain. Nothing uttered.

Alia Kobuszko's poetry is as immediate as it is mysterious. She is unafraid of detonating form or trusting a quiet phrase, and saturates these poems with surreal and sensuous aspects. In this enchanting and piercing debut, strange horses gallop - embodying metamorphic freedom and power. The speaker becomes the rider, the horse itself and even the field, enacting how the poet inhabits and unanchors their subject so that 'girl and horse / stand still- / field runs through them.'

Genres: Poetry

71 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 27, 2026

Reviews

[Oliver Maynard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dream Latitudes is a collection I admired more than loved. At its core, it’s preoccupied with embodiment - with what it means to inhabit a body that desires, fractures, remembers, and resists transcendence. Nature is everywhere in these poems, but not in a comforting, Romantic way. There are deliberate, sometimes sharp departures from Keatsian lushness or Wordsworthian calm; beauty here is unstable, excessive, occasionally hostile. Where Romantic poetry seeks stillness or aesthetic fixity, Kobuszko insists on motion, disruption, and bodily presence.

At its best, the collection is uncanny and unsettling - almost Lynchian in its dream-logic, with flashes of Plath’s intensity and Duffy’s gendered sharpness. Some poems feel charged and rewarding, particularly those that explore language’s limits or the tension between being seen and speaking.

But the book can also feel scattershot. The protean shifts in voice and structure, especially in Part III, sometimes resist cohesion rather than building toward a compelling thematic arc. A few poems felt conceptually abstract in a way that distanced rather than deepened the emotional experience.

Still, there’s something bracing about its refusal of neat resolution. Even when it slips from grasp, it remains intriguing - a collection that provokes thought, if not always attachment.

[Day Ravenstone · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

I really liked this. There was something about the tone that absolutely hooked it's claws into me.

The disruptive formatting is exactly what I like in poetry and how I want to write it. I absolutely will be referencing this book as an inspiration for my own work in my upcoming assessment.

"then the body bathing in it was river-silt" viscerally reminded me of The Knight and the Moon by Rachel Gillig. I love that book and being reminded of it added to my enjoyment of this book.

[Graham Sillars · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was a lot here to like.

A few went over my head but I appreciated their composition and the pictures they painted in my mind.

[Fliss Alwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed making my way through this. Some were really beautiful. I like the disrupted formatting and the composition and can see myself returning to it.