Undersleep

by Julie Doxsee

Poetry. In her debut collection Julie Doxsee's finely wrought lyric poems create a world operating according to the rules of dream-logic. Both exquisite and unsettling, her poems twist the reader with every line break and surprise of language. "Spare, bright, and sharp these poems spark, tossing up unexpected words, making strange connections, inventing vocabulary, and in general, cracking open the natural world and letting us watch it tick. Intimate and worldly at the same time, Julie Doxsee is a surprising and deeply gifted poet, and this, her first book, glows in the dark"--Cole Swensen.

Genres: Poetry

87 pages

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Jesse]

"Film runs out. The earth is not a building. It is paper born in the woods & hacked into rectangles children flip through."



" You.
Even you set

a footprint each
year near

her imprint."

[Bryan Coleman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Julie Doxsee's poems create a world operating according to the rules of dream-logic. Both exquisite and unsettling, her poems twist the reader with every line break and surprise of language.

Spare, bright, and sharp these poems spark, tossing up unexpected words, making strange connections, inventing vocabulary, and in general, cracking open the natural world and letting us watch it tick. Intimate and worldly at the same time.


However, bluntly I would say a handful of these poems were truly great, while the rest left more to be desired. Some of the poems in this novel simply perplexed me. I had to re-read some of the shorter ones over once more to truly understand them, even though in some instances this action did not help. I can see certain readers truly loving this book and others hating it. The only parts of this book that really annoyed me as the reader was the way Doxsee structured some of her poems. For Example, "To Be Opened After My Death," has some of the longest most irregular spacing for any poem I have ever read. The poem itself was actually enjoyable, but the way it was structured bothered me so much I could not enjoy it.

[Victoria Elmore · Rating 2 out of 5]

Undersleep constantly reminded me of a Salvador Dali painting; the poems seem to take place in a world somewhere between dreams and reality. Julie Doxsee surprises the reader with odd language choices making each individual word seem intentional and full of secret meanings waiting to be deciphered. Her choice of line breaks gives each poem a sculptural quality – they force an observer to onsider the space they inhabit. That she pays so much attention to both language choice and line breaks encouraged me to reread the poems many times; first just straight through, then picking apart each stanza, each line, and each word. Such attention to detail does not necessarily reveal the exact “meaning” of any particular poem, but instead immerses the reader in the beautiful and unique images that Doxsee’s writing depicts.

[Gus Wenner · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fashion in which Julie Doxsee formats her poems in Undersleep is unique and interesting. She writes sparse stanzas with few words in each line. Doxsee's curious way of formatting her words on the page ends up shaping the poems themselves. In other words, the format becomes just as much a part of the meaning as any other aspect of the poem. When she breaks her rhythm for a poem like "Rock Erodes A Lifespan," it only hits harder. In said poem the longer lines engulf the language, creating emotional imagery of night scape and outer space. Although at times I was unsure of what Doxsee was saying in a linear sense, I was struck by her poems in other, more abstract ways - beautiful lines, inventive language, imagination. Read "The Deep Shadow Life Of Your Cousin" and you will get the sense of what I am talking about, both in terms of her spacing and her use of language.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Julie Doxsee constructs poems that appear rather spare and simple on the page but reveal twisting, shifting logic and unexpected, quirky diction. She explores plays on words and imagery that aren't always clear and comprehensible but usually add a different spin or facet to the poem. For example, in "Roped-off Gravity," Doxsee employs the word "butterfly" as a verb: "A glint of blue/butterflies its way..." Doxsee tends to keep her lines very short and her titles prevent the reader from being totally lost as they usually frame the poem, even if the poem itself seems to stray and become confusing. While I didn't find this book of poetry the easiest to follow, I did enjoy the words and images Doxsee used and liked her overall sparse yet lyrical style.

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I did not feel as if I understood most of Julie Doxsee’s poems, I appreciated her use of spacing and placement of certain words. She also uses unfamiliar words and word combinations to spark different kinds of associations. Her style and word usage work appropriately under the title, Undersleep, for most of the poems seem to have a dreamy and disconnected quality to them. That is not to say that they are disorganized—in fact, there are various ideas and terms that Doxsee brings up repetitively, such as paradise, the color blue, footprints, avalanches, and natural beings (birds, trees, dogs, etc.). My favorite poem was “Pond,” though I am not completely sure as to why I enjoyed it.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Doxsee is very skillful with sound, creative with form, has good taste in imagery. The problem is that her book seems to have chosen, as a major stylistic theme, the notion of keeping the reader on the periphery, "limited to outlying visions" of her mind, the world. So her surprising and hard-hitting lines get tired after a while. She gets boring by keeping the reader at a distance, and soon I felt as if I had "caught on" to her strategies and her attitude. And then she wasn't so creative any more. I wrote the words "cop out" in the margins of this book a lot of times.

[Jeremy Allan]

I am not prepared to give this a rating. This book is outside my comfort zone, so I'm not sure a numerical assessment is really appropriate (when is it ever?). I want to say this is contemporary surrealism, but even that seems to point the fact that, at heart, I don't get it. Of course, this is probably not the fault of the book, rather than a show of my own weakness in this area of poetry. What I do know is that when a poem struck me, it played me like a hammered dulcimer. I will return to this book in the (near) future, to see what more I can learn.

[Rebecca Tassell]

Julie Doxsee's poems revolve around dreams, nightmares and nature. She seems to have two main forms of writing structure: multiple two lined stanzas and verse paragraphs. The “Paradise” that she speaks of in some of her poems seems to refer to sleeping. My favorite poem is We Fly Balloons because it I can put myself there with her in the dream as she’s floating over the clouds and wearing “cloud shoes.” When she speaks of storms and falcons, it's as if those are to symbolize nightmares.

[Marco · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a lot of trouble understanding the poems in this collection. I liked some of the word pairings because they were unique but it wasn't clear what Doxsee was trying to accomplish. Most of the poems were short with compact lines and stanzas. At times though, the short lines and line breaks didn't seem to make sense and got in the way of my reading. Overall it was an interesting read but not one of my favorites.

[Trey Harris]

I give up