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The Dream of Reason
In her debut collection, Jenny George wields a poetic voice marked by focus and image-driven strangeness that is saturated in the horrors of the wild and the tamed. Responding to the post-industrial landscape of rural life, Jenny George braids together regional plains poetry and the darkly fantastic imagery of medieval painting. Alluding to Goya’s grotesque bestiary, The Dream of Reason is similarly preoccupied with creatures of all kinds: tiny husks of insects, bats crawling across porches like goblins, purring moths, and pigs, in many forms. George names these creatures and documents the traumas of farm life, the role of the handlers involved, and the empathy and horror that comes with it. The collection lingers, transfixed by its strange imaginings, searching for sense in the dark.
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Paperback
First published April 17, 2018
7 people are currently reading
305 people want to read
About the author
Jenny George
7 books14 followersJenny George earned her BA in human ecology and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon, 2018), and her poems have appeared in FIELD, Ploughshares, and Crab Orchard Review, among other journals. Winner of the 2015 Discovery / Boston Review Poetry Prize, George has received fellowships from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fund, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she serves as program coordinator for Hidden Leaf Foundation, a Buddhist-based social justice organization.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
December 13, 2018
Find me a better opening poem in a debut collection. What a unique book. One that you can read from front to back in an hour, but one that demands much more time. Again, find me a better opening poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
December 17, 2020
Some very striking and moving poems in this debut collection. I'll definitely be looking for more work from this poet.
June 19, 2023
Will be thinking about this and what she is doing for a long time.
November 11, 2018
Perfectly toeing the line between dreams and reality, Jenny George captures a facet of human emotion that lives in our subconscious swimming just beneath the surface of the things we can comprehend and put words to. Dreams often make little sense, but they provide key insight to the human mind and heart, and I couldn’t ask for a better representation of that than what I find in this book of poems!
June 16, 2018
I love this book so much.
September 10, 2021
This collection is my first exposure to pig-slaughter poetry, and as a result, Jenny George is my new favorite poet--lush, full of invention and keen but quirky observation. Her verse is delicate and earthy and reminds me of loam. Here's one of her shortest pieces called "Vaudeville:"
The pigs hang in rows like pink overcoats.
Their slaughter is fresh, a rosy blush--
as if chorus girls have only just
stepped out of them,
leaving the empty garments
swaying on their hooks.
The pigs hang in rows like pink overcoats.
Their slaughter is fresh, a rosy blush--
as if chorus girls have only just
stepped out of them,
leaving the empty garments
swaying on their hooks.
September 11, 2018
I would not have thought I would have been so riveted, and moved, by a book with an entire section mostly about pigs, but I was! This section was both unusual and wonderful. I felt the influence of Louise Glück in these poems, but refashioned through a pastoral approach. Much to admire in this book.
May 9, 2021
Moving and meditative throughout, the poems focused on pigs midway through were the strongest and unique. Exquisite work.
January 13, 2021
I loved these poems, and I love Jenny George's voice, but her work is *so* controlled and sometimes I just wanted her to like...go crazy. Abandon all reason. Give in.
October 16, 2018
4 1/2
Animals are people, too.
Seriously, the language here is so stupidly good.
Animals are people, too.
Seriously, the language here is so stupidly good.
April 28, 2019
I wasn't sure how I felt about this collection after the first section, but once I hit section two (the pig poems), I was hooked. At times this book made me feel like I was in a dream or, more accurately, a nightmare where violence and tenderness co-exist and a child lives inside the adult. This is a stunning debut collection, and I look forward to reading more of Jenny George's work in the future.
June 24, 2019
Loved the images following the words.
June 7, 2022
This is a lovely chapbook from Jenny George. The language is accessible and often striking:
"It's dawn; the dark unjoins
and drifts off into light." ("The Gesture of Turning a Mask Around," 16)
"...now he is slipping
into the silvery minnows"of dreams..." ("Everything is Restored," 10)
Underneath the surface, however, there's a line running of...something.
The book is dividied into 3 numbered sections but opens with a single poem titled, "Origins of Violence." And there is terrible violence in section II where George speaks to sleeping pigs looking like children sleeping and then the violence done to such pigs in her palendrone poem "The Traveling Line:"
"...There is the clank of metal.
They hold still inside confusion.
A current passes through their bodies.
Blood comes from their mouths in strings.
by the ankles they are swiftly inverted.
Blood comes from their mouths in string..." (page 24)
That and a beaten horse are surface violence. There are also (2?) deaths of children, one definitely by drowning (which is mentioned in other poems that have nothing to do with the drowned child), the violence of her father shooting a calf in the head, and disecting a frog, a reference to devastation which has already happened (not named), and:
I know exactly
what I want.
The sun burns off the mist.
I take my violence out over the field.
I do not know whereof she speaks in this poem titled, "Sword-Swaller," where she says, "The soul enter/through childhood."
I think you have to take the whole chapbook together, and watch the different themes that are woven if you want to come to a larger understanding (I haven't done that yet). I think it's worth the work. I think George has a lovely book here, and I love her voice. She is very clear eyed about the pigs, and how she wants to show us their fate. It was drew me to the book in the first place.
"It's dawn; the dark unjoins
and drifts off into light." ("The Gesture of Turning a Mask Around," 16)
"...now he is slipping
into the silvery minnows"of dreams..." ("Everything is Restored," 10)
Underneath the surface, however, there's a line running of...something.
The book is dividied into 3 numbered sections but opens with a single poem titled, "Origins of Violence." And there is terrible violence in section II where George speaks to sleeping pigs looking like children sleeping and then the violence done to such pigs in her palendrone poem "The Traveling Line:"
"...There is the clank of metal.
They hold still inside confusion.
A current passes through their bodies.
Blood comes from their mouths in strings.
by the ankles they are swiftly inverted.
Blood comes from their mouths in string..." (page 24)
That and a beaten horse are surface violence. There are also (2?) deaths of children, one definitely by drowning (which is mentioned in other poems that have nothing to do with the drowned child), the violence of her father shooting a calf in the head, and disecting a frog, a reference to devastation which has already happened (not named), and:
I know exactly
what I want.
The sun burns off the mist.
I take my violence out over the field.
I do not know whereof she speaks in this poem titled, "Sword-Swaller," where she says, "The soul enter/through childhood."
I think you have to take the whole chapbook together, and watch the different themes that are woven if you want to come to a larger understanding (I haven't done that yet). I think it's worth the work. I think George has a lovely book here, and I love her voice. She is very clear eyed about the pigs, and how she wants to show us their fate. It was drew me to the book in the first place.
January 21, 2019
📚📚📚📚📚 Damn, Jenny George, damn you are good. This debut collection sings with eerie, violent beauty, exposing the violence we cause to animals, to each other, and to ourselves in the name of survival and necessity.
Here’s the opening poem, “Origins of Violence”:
There is a hole.
In the hole is everything
people will do
to each other.
The hole goes down and down.
It has many rooms
like graves and like graves
they are all connected.
Roots hang from the dirt
in craggy chandeliers.
It’s not clear
where the hole stops
beginning and where
it starts to end.
It’s warm and dark down there.
The passages multiply.
There are ballrooms.
There are dead ends.
The air smells of iron and
crushed flowers.
People will do anything.
They will cut the hands off children.
Children will do anything—
In the hole is everything.
Here’s the opening poem, “Origins of Violence”:
There is a hole.
In the hole is everything
people will do
to each other.
The hole goes down and down.
It has many rooms
like graves and like graves
they are all connected.
Roots hang from the dirt
in craggy chandeliers.
It’s not clear
where the hole stops
beginning and where
it starts to end.
It’s warm and dark down there.
The passages multiply.
There are ballrooms.
There are dead ends.
The air smells of iron and
crushed flowers.
People will do anything.
They will cut the hands off children.
Children will do anything—
In the hole is everything.
June 28, 2022
Before language, there was just
the peculiar house of nerves.
Now the world is buried in me, to the hilt.
I know exactly
what I want.
["Sword-Swallower"]
Or this, the final section of the title poem:
8. A Childhood
The horse had been beaten and flies
crawled excited on the beat marks.
He held still in the sunblazed pasture.
For a few minutes I stood at the wire fence.
He was aware of me, but he did not turn--
except his eye, slightly. He listened
through the many ears of the grasses.
A jay made a hole in the air with its cry.
Everywhere, invisible as heat, the gods
married each other and went to war.
The excitement of it vibrated in the flies.
As if we were both standing still
inside some greater, more violent motion.
Just. Wow.
the peculiar house of nerves.
Now the world is buried in me, to the hilt.
I know exactly
what I want.
["Sword-Swallower"]
Or this, the final section of the title poem:
8. A Childhood
The horse had been beaten and flies
crawled excited on the beat marks.
He held still in the sunblazed pasture.
For a few minutes I stood at the wire fence.
He was aware of me, but he did not turn--
except his eye, slightly. He listened
through the many ears of the grasses.
A jay made a hole in the air with its cry.
Everywhere, invisible as heat, the gods
married each other and went to war.
The excitement of it vibrated in the flies.
As if we were both standing still
inside some greater, more violent motion.
Just. Wow.
December 16, 2023
In these poems is a great stillness, like the space between breaths: the inhalation of living and the exhalation of dying. The poet’s voice is quiet, too, and laconic, like an empty wind that wrings fields dry and stifles consolation. The poet’s eye has witnessed too much daily violence: memories of childhood trauma; the crates, pens, chutes, and cattle trucks of livestock farming; the abuse; the slaughter; the carcasses; the bones; gods blind to the cruelty; that wrenching revelation about our likeness to those gods. So much violent motion. It never gets easier for any of us.
Favorite Poems:
“Troubles”
“The Belt”
“Ears”
“One-Way Gate”
“The River”
“New World”
“The Cave”
“Sword-Swallower”
“The Dream of Reason”
“Revelation” (a masterpiece)
“Mnemonic”
Favorite Poems:
“Troubles”
“The Belt”
“Ears”
“One-Way Gate”
“The River”
“New World”
“The Cave”
“Sword-Swallower”
“The Dream of Reason”
“Revelation” (a masterpiece)
“Mnemonic”
March 27, 2020
Jenny George, in her debut collection, offers courage in her capacity to chaperone the reader through the inner and outer savageries inherent in a human geography. Her poems solvently diagram the animal inside us, outside of us, as us....
The violence depicted, sometimes impassively and graphically, in The Dream of Reason are not a source of pleasant refuge or escape. Rather, the poems are haunted by the human pressuring of animal brutality. Read full review at: https://poemeleon.me/review-dream-of-...
The violence depicted, sometimes impassively and graphically, in The Dream of Reason are not a source of pleasant refuge or escape. Rather, the poems are haunted by the human pressuring of animal brutality. Read full review at: https://poemeleon.me/review-dream-of-...
October 6, 2018
"The trees are full of staring crows./ After we die, our lives take up no space at all./ The same is true of love." A fascinating debut collection, which presents a rural world as city dwellers like myself will never know - and by extension, a different kind of wisdom about humanity. Here, a pig is both a friend and a dinner, a body, merely a cage of bones a person or an animal is stuck in.
January 26, 2019
"Vaudeville
The pigs hang in rows like pink overcoats.
Their slaughter is fresh, a rosy blush--
as if chorus girls have only just
stepped out of them,
leaving the empty garments
swaying on their hooks."
This book is absolutely stunning- it is one of the best books of poetry I've read.
The pigs hang in rows like pink overcoats.
Their slaughter is fresh, a rosy blush--
as if chorus girls have only just
stepped out of them,
leaving the empty garments
swaying on their hooks."
This book is absolutely stunning- it is one of the best books of poetry I've read.
June 3, 2019
one review said that this book opens with a mindblowing first line, and that's such a spot an assessment that only misses how it maintains that intensity throughout even as things quiet to a whisper. Loved it, and grateful to my friend for sending me a copy.
May 24, 2021
I read this collection after being shown "The Belt". The way Jenny George arranges this collection is phenomenal. The pastoral themes and usage of livestock really cause the reader to reflect on the concept of life and its value.
March 29, 2024
Prompted a rare love at first sight experience after reading the opening poem "Threshold Gods." I adore this book.
Currently cannot get the line All sleeping things are children. out of my head.
Currently cannot get the line All sleeping things are children. out of my head.
October 4, 2025
I find this collection of poems to be superb. Jenny George is not trying to impress anyone or trick us or provide any answers. She is merely holding up this world in a way that we can really see it. And what’s behind it.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
December 20, 2018
So many I want to re-read and remember and keep with me.
April 15, 2020
A knockout debut by Jenny George, indeed!
August 23, 2020
Really startling, stunning lines and images in this collection. Haunting, contemporary pastorals.
December 2, 2021
Intense and maybe not what I was looking for, but undeniably full of visceral and powerful imagery
February 14, 2022
Imagery and a rhythm that just hits right. Gorgeous language.
June 18, 2022
one of my favorite nature poets ever. and Threshold Gods is one of my favorite poems
May 10, 2023
Annoyed at how good this DEBUT (debut!!!) collection is. Save some oracular talent for the rest of us, GOD
Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews