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The Sunflower Cast a Spell To Save Us From The Void
In The Sunflower, Wang follows the sunflower’s many dream guises―its evolving symbolism in literature, society, and the author’s own dream life using a mathopoetic technique to generate poems using the Fibonacci sequence (a pattern found in the seed spirals of sunflower). The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void embodies what Wang calls oneiric poetry: a poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams. Although dreams, in psychoanalytic discourse, have been conceptualized as a window into the unconscious, Wang’s poetry emphasizes the social dimension of dreams, particularly the use of dreams to index historical trauma and social processes.
120 pages, Paperback
First published January 26, 2021
39 people are currently reading
1542 people want to read
About the author
Jackie Wang
15 books290 followersJackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD student at Harvard University. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 104 reviews
December 17, 2021
makes me want to take some oneirogens and start a dream journal. there's something so indulgent about reading a log of someone's subconscious, but it's also, i think, conspiratorial, and conspiracy whets the knife of revolution. gossip as praxis, etc. lol'ed at wang's "i don't believe the imagination can fix everything (I am a rigorous materialist!), but it can do some of the work" – i too desperately want to believe that.
October 15, 2021
This book is on the finalist list for the National Book Award but it is not to my tastes. The poems seem to all be based on dreams with a lot of repeated themes (apocalypse) and unfortunately phrases (blood dripping down her legs) with bonus quirky drawings.
But look, poetry is subjective, maybe it will work for you.
But look, poetry is subjective, maybe it will work for you.
March 13, 2021
For a collection of poems that were maybe a dream diary, maybe also an extended existential crisis, there is so much story here that lingers with me. It actually took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that these were all dreams (so vivid, so bizarre, so vulnerable). Reading this collection helped me remember that “truth” isn’t the pursuit of a poet’s craft, but rather that language can court the poet’s experience. Can words ever wrap themselves around a dream? Read for your own conclusion.
April 14, 2022
Instead of opening doors and walking through them, I smash windows and glass walls. Everything is always locked so it has to be this way. I carry a giant axe around with me, which I stole from a fire emergency box. I worry the axe will give me away and I will be caught, but I'm not trying to be malicious . . . I simply am impatient. This mode of entering buildings goes viral. Now there are many of us who carry axes and never wait to be let in.
July 18, 2024
thinking about those annoying poetry workshop people who are like “I don’t wanna hear about your dreams” or “poems about dreams are so passé” and how’d they’d read this book and hate it and then I’d laugh at them
March 4, 2024
Maybe I'm glad I didn't go to grad school
February 19, 2024
I feel like they tell you to not write about dreams, but here she wrote about dreams so literally it seemed more fine. Sometimes I got tired reading this person I don’t know recount her dreams?? but I liked how simple and childlike the language was. How decisive some of the opinions were, her academic bg coming in but not in a way that felt lofty. Given her bg I thought this would be more serious/political w big structural critiques or whatever so I was surprised it was so fun and girly and so much about sex and intimacy and performing and being insecure and having little twittery moments w ppl about who is a real POC or leftist factionalism. Which was cool to place side by side w this pagan grandiosity in the titles or specific lines
Sometimes it felt like she was saying smth about how big political structures are reducible to feelings like punishment/pleasure (“wounded adjudication”), or things like pool rules (“panic at the disco”), this very girly clear simple wise voice
I really liked the poems that were less built around the “I”, usually in the lineated ones, like “creatures abandoned by time” and “waiting for godel,” not explicitly a dream but still dreamy, w its weird grandiose final statement “but sometimes the moon is such that you just kind of slide into the glory hole that is your life, the brave freewheeling musicality of existence”
Sometimes it felt like she was saying smth about how big political structures are reducible to feelings like punishment/pleasure (“wounded adjudication”), or things like pool rules (“panic at the disco”), this very girly clear simple wise voice
I really liked the poems that were less built around the “I”, usually in the lineated ones, like “creatures abandoned by time” and “waiting for godel,” not explicitly a dream but still dreamy, w its weird grandiose final statement “but sometimes the moon is such that you just kind of slide into the glory hole that is your life, the brave freewheeling musicality of existence”
March 24, 2022
The Sunflower Cast a Spell To Save Us From The Void was a perplexing poetry collection unlike anything else I've read. Each poem was surreal and very visceral. The entire time I was reading this collection, I had incredibly vivid, strange dreams. I'm not sure I enjoyed these poems but that also doesn't feel like the point.
January 8, 2022
How amazing is this title? These poems are an existential crisis, a heliotropic gaze at the void of reality. They are perfect for right now.
Super abstract, this one probably isn’t for everyone but it’s so good. She’s writing inside a dream, in the weird hopes of a dream even when it’s sometimes a nightmare and it sometimes makes no sense. It’s comforting, nonetheless. Our dreams are part of our being - can they help us get through the apocalypse?
A lovely collection of poetry. Experimental and full of gorgeous language, and there are so many lines where I want just that line - to remember it forever. Beginning with the title itself - “The Sunflower cast a spell to save us from the void” - astonishing. The first poem is called “Life is a Place Where It’s Forbidden to Live”. Magic on every single page.
She breaks that wall that we all break when we dream. It's fascinating, sometimes it’s a scary nightmare, sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it hardly makes sense.
The themes include climate change, being watched by technology, finding hope in radical, queer communities, and simply living with the very real apocalyptic feelings most people are feeling these days.
This poetry of dreams is a gift for the days we are living in.
Super abstract, this one probably isn’t for everyone but it’s so good. She’s writing inside a dream, in the weird hopes of a dream even when it’s sometimes a nightmare and it sometimes makes no sense. It’s comforting, nonetheless. Our dreams are part of our being - can they help us get through the apocalypse?
A lovely collection of poetry. Experimental and full of gorgeous language, and there are so many lines where I want just that line - to remember it forever. Beginning with the title itself - “The Sunflower cast a spell to save us from the void” - astonishing. The first poem is called “Life is a Place Where It’s Forbidden to Live”. Magic on every single page.
She breaks that wall that we all break when we dream. It's fascinating, sometimes it’s a scary nightmare, sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it hardly makes sense.
The themes include climate change, being watched by technology, finding hope in radical, queer communities, and simply living with the very real apocalyptic feelings most people are feeling these days.
This poetry of dreams is a gift for the days we are living in.
August 28, 2021
My first note on this collection was just, “i don’t know what is going on. i love it” and that mostly held up throughout hahah
This is a collection of poems about Wang’s dreams, but together they form wider discussions of apocalypse & revolution, trauma, survival, trust, punishment, missed communication, language barriers, friendship, and connection.
I might not have understood each poem in their entirety, but I loved individual lines and the creativity and intrigue of the whole collection.
My favorite poem was The Evil Noodle.
There are also weird little illustrations by Kalan Sherrard that imagine parts of the poems and seemed to fit right in alongside these dream recollections.
—
Some other random lines I loved:
-Maxine memorializes people in a way that only a queer who has lived through the AIDS crisis can.
-Can I even know if I did what I did for the pleasure of punishment or because my complaint was just? / Maybe I was equally undone by the act of admitting I had been wronged / Because to make such an assertion is a claim to dignity that goes against my primary sense of worthlessness.
-“You’re a woman with a diseased heart,” she says, “which should not be confused with heart disease, as a diseased heart is what you get after bleeding too many unstitched metaphors.”
-All the dreams where I am spoken to in Chinese and I can’t speak back / The falling bridge of language
-First of all nobody will survive money.
-Again, the world has lost its object constancy. I have to explain all over again that my brother is still in prison. And they say, Still? Because they’ve forgotten. Because it’s no longer an event.
—
I can’t wait to return to these poems in the future, and I am sooo excited to read her other book Carceral Capitalism, a hybrid nonfiction book.
This is a collection of poems about Wang’s dreams, but together they form wider discussions of apocalypse & revolution, trauma, survival, trust, punishment, missed communication, language barriers, friendship, and connection.
I might not have understood each poem in their entirety, but I loved individual lines and the creativity and intrigue of the whole collection.
My favorite poem was The Evil Noodle.
There are also weird little illustrations by Kalan Sherrard that imagine parts of the poems and seemed to fit right in alongside these dream recollections.
—
Some other random lines I loved:
-Maxine memorializes people in a way that only a queer who has lived through the AIDS crisis can.
-Can I even know if I did what I did for the pleasure of punishment or because my complaint was just? / Maybe I was equally undone by the act of admitting I had been wronged / Because to make such an assertion is a claim to dignity that goes against my primary sense of worthlessness.
-“You’re a woman with a diseased heart,” she says, “which should not be confused with heart disease, as a diseased heart is what you get after bleeding too many unstitched metaphors.”
-All the dreams where I am spoken to in Chinese and I can’t speak back / The falling bridge of language
-First of all nobody will survive money.
-Again, the world has lost its object constancy. I have to explain all over again that my brother is still in prison. And they say, Still? Because they’ve forgotten. Because it’s no longer an event.
—
I can’t wait to return to these poems in the future, and I am sooo excited to read her other book Carceral Capitalism, a hybrid nonfiction book.
November 5, 2023
above my pay grade
Read
March 30, 2023When I say that I am not a fan of surrealism, what I mean is that I do not like things that are solely guided by the logic of dreams. In this sense, I walked into this collection of poems knowing it was not for me. That being said, I didn’t hate the writing all too much either - if these poems were themed differently I might have actually enjoyed this. My rating for this truthfully is 3/5, but my new rule is not rating anything on Goodreads below a 4 as I don’t intend to hurt sales numbers.
My biggest issue with these poems is that they felt extremely online. It was in the presentation, and although I think this book was very contemporary it already feels dated to me. The author fills the books with references to things that other “cultured people” are intended to pick up on, like Simone Weil or various films or semiotexte. Sure, I know these touch points, but often it felt like in-group language rather than references that actually transfigure meaning. Without that it felt like striking a pose. I felt that there was a very clear audience in mind with the composition of these poems, a following even, that would read or listen to these and nod. This was further cemented by the references to specific friends or specific actions. When I say it was too personal and not personal enough, I think it goes back to the idea of a “following” rather than a general audience. If you know, you know - if not, follow and find more. And this is a major problem I have with online activity - I feel like there’s this general lack of awareness, or choosing to ignore, that compiling a list of names of artists you admire is also an act of consumption and distribution.
I guess part of this collection is to emphasize the social element of dreaming? I hate conversations about dreams in part because they are so personal and lack weight. But poetry itself is, admittedly, a dreamy medium. When Jackie Wang comes across an interesting line, it sticks. But other times it just feels so insubstantial. I did not feel that these poems were structured or edited in a way that allowed for the stronger moments to crest above the noise. I would have preferred more organization or clearer intent.
Admittedly I’m rambling off things I didn’t enjoy about this in a haphazard way, but I think reading this has been a useful exercise for me in the kind of writing that the internet inspires that doesn’t work for me. That being said, I’d certainly be interested in reading some of her nonfiction - reading this, I got the impression that she has an interesting perspective on the world and she’s definitely a talented writer. I bet that she could write astounding autofiction (compliment here.) It’s just that the whole thing got muddled by staring for too long at its own image, I think. If you’re going to tell a story about a dream to me, a dream-hater, you’ve got to start with a pretty impressive introduction to tell me why it’s worth hearing out, and the answer can’t just be “because you were in it”.
Recommended for: fans of Chris Kraus, people who like Rupi Kaur but want something more sophisticated/nuanced/polished, Twitter users, people who journal
My biggest issue with these poems is that they felt extremely online. It was in the presentation, and although I think this book was very contemporary it already feels dated to me. The author fills the books with references to things that other “cultured people” are intended to pick up on, like Simone Weil or various films or semiotexte. Sure, I know these touch points, but often it felt like in-group language rather than references that actually transfigure meaning. Without that it felt like striking a pose. I felt that there was a very clear audience in mind with the composition of these poems, a following even, that would read or listen to these and nod. This was further cemented by the references to specific friends or specific actions. When I say it was too personal and not personal enough, I think it goes back to the idea of a “following” rather than a general audience. If you know, you know - if not, follow and find more. And this is a major problem I have with online activity - I feel like there’s this general lack of awareness, or choosing to ignore, that compiling a list of names of artists you admire is also an act of consumption and distribution.
I guess part of this collection is to emphasize the social element of dreaming? I hate conversations about dreams in part because they are so personal and lack weight. But poetry itself is, admittedly, a dreamy medium. When Jackie Wang comes across an interesting line, it sticks. But other times it just feels so insubstantial. I did not feel that these poems were structured or edited in a way that allowed for the stronger moments to crest above the noise. I would have preferred more organization or clearer intent.
Admittedly I’m rambling off things I didn’t enjoy about this in a haphazard way, but I think reading this has been a useful exercise for me in the kind of writing that the internet inspires that doesn’t work for me. That being said, I’d certainly be interested in reading some of her nonfiction - reading this, I got the impression that she has an interesting perspective on the world and she’s definitely a talented writer. I bet that she could write astounding autofiction (compliment here.) It’s just that the whole thing got muddled by staring for too long at its own image, I think. If you’re going to tell a story about a dream to me, a dream-hater, you’ve got to start with a pretty impressive introduction to tell me why it’s worth hearing out, and the answer can’t just be “because you were in it”.
Recommended for: fans of Chris Kraus, people who like Rupi Kaur but want something more sophisticated/nuanced/polished, Twitter users, people who journal
Read
February 17, 2025p.24 ("The Future is Between Us")
As soon as I take my book out of my backpack the server tells me to leave. "This isn't the place for that." In other words, it is time to face the judgment.
p.89 ("Creatures Abandoned by Time")
You can't imagine how much attention I give the worm on the sidewalk of LA
or the tree of coral inside my dream
p.92 ("Waiting for Godel")
But I truly believe we're not waiting to become our better selves, that we're already so great as it is. We are aureoled beings doing our being thing
It's not easy being alive
This I know
But sometimes the moon is such that you just kind of slide into the glory hole that is your life, the brave freewheeling musicality of existence.
p.110-12 ("Because There is Silence")
A symphony of rats becomes the echo of a text written by the one who does not belong anywhere
...
"I" is the background of thought at the beginning of sleep.
...
...drunk on the possibility of being seen...
...
(The withholding demeanor of the one who feels truly alone will always be mistaken for scorn.)
(Because they can't read you, they assume the worst.)
(Because there is silence.)
(This is my silence, which is not silence at all, but bracketed speech.)
p.120 [A Moment Breaking Loose from the Past Becomes the Voice Inside Your Head]
p.126 ("The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void")
I watched a woman try on a button-down cowboy shirt and fur coat. Wanted to snatch the shirt off her body, believing it would make me lovable.
As soon as I take my book out of my backpack the server tells me to leave. "This isn't the place for that." In other words, it is time to face the judgment.
p.89 ("Creatures Abandoned by Time")
You can't imagine how much attention I give the worm on the sidewalk of LA
or the tree of coral inside my dream
p.92 ("Waiting for Godel")
But I truly believe we're not waiting to become our better selves, that we're already so great as it is. We are aureoled beings doing our being thing
It's not easy being alive
This I know
But sometimes the moon is such that you just kind of slide into the glory hole that is your life, the brave freewheeling musicality of existence.
p.110-12 ("Because There is Silence")
A symphony of rats becomes the echo of a text written by the one who does not belong anywhere
...
"I" is the background of thought at the beginning of sleep.
...
...drunk on the possibility of being seen...
...
(The withholding demeanor of the one who feels truly alone will always be mistaken for scorn.)
(Because they can't read you, they assume the worst.)
(Because there is silence.)
(This is my silence, which is not silence at all, but bracketed speech.)
p.120 [A Moment Breaking Loose from the Past Becomes the Voice Inside Your Head]
p.126 ("The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void")
I watched a woman try on a button-down cowboy shirt and fur coat. Wanted to snatch the shirt off her body, believing it would make me lovable.
January 7, 2022
This collection was consistent and provided such beautiful coils around its center themes. It was a beautiful experience to step into this book and I am happy that this is the first book I finished in 2022! Wang offers light to her readers and a way to understand that there is something there alongside uncertainty of nothing being there at all.
"The parts I tell you are often not the most important parts of the dream"
Wang's dream poetry offers so much and creates a closeness and reality amongst its mirage of images. I believe that this deserved the praise that it receives, it truly is a great, effervescent collection. One worth returning to and beginning with.
"The parts I tell you are often not the most important parts of the dream"
Wang's dream poetry offers so much and creates a closeness and reality amongst its mirage of images. I believe that this deserved the praise that it receives, it truly is a great, effervescent collection. One worth returning to and beginning with.
October 24, 2023
On a craft level, I think this is a smart book that achieves what it sets out to do (capturing a sort of "dream-like" aesthetic and logic to explore society, history, and psychology).
Marking this as two stars because the style and level of abstraction were not my cup of tea and did not work for me personally.
Marking this as two stars because the style and level of abstraction were not my cup of tea and did not work for me personally.
January 7, 2024
Read in dread, the day before flying kids to Orlando for 6-day theme park adventure. Read with Super Kitties playing from the playroom. Read in full and constant awareness that these poems are in a club I am not in. That’s fine. Just felt like my face was constantly smooshing against the glass to see inside.
June 6, 2024
que suerte haber llevado la kindle a las elecciones. terminé el libro antes de poder votar. no me imaginaba leerlo así, parada, asoleada y deshidratada. tenía tantas ganas de ver los poemas de jackie después de disfrutar tanto su libro de escritos y ensayos. este es su libro más famoso, ganó un premio importante de poesía, igual siento que me gustó más el otro. son mayoritariamente prosa, en una primera persona narrativa, y casi todos son registros de sus sueños: una mariposa que se posa en su pie y jamás la suelta, andar en bici con chris kraus, tomar clases con kant, dormir en los ductos de ventilación de la prisión en la que está encerrado su hermano, robarse un libro egipcio del museo británico, el lago frente al que creció, su mamá diciéndole « lentejita », etcétera
September 27, 2021
Wang's collection orchestrates the convergence of new images and identities. This is an author whose voice plays with punk aesthetic, film and new media, art, gender and sexuality, and--in the collection's best work--comes up with radically new combinations.
There are some times when Wang's aesthetic--prose poetry--is harder for me to connect with, but that's more often things to do with me.
There are some times when Wang's aesthetic--prose poetry--is harder for me to connect with, but that's more often things to do with me.
May 18, 2025
These poems are the living embodiments of fever dreams. Somehow apocalyptic but uplifting, I throughly enjoyed the experience of reading and being baffled by the ornate language with which these fragmented stories were told.
November 14, 2021
This book reads like the unraveling of a never ending fever dream.
Read
May 6, 2025I’m just not cool/smart enough to read poetry 🤷🏻♀️🤣
June 8, 2025
“Making sweet love inside our little pocket of the void” Read this back and forth with Sophie and now we dream of cunt river
January 29, 2022
Every word is absolutely stunning, and unlike much that I’ve read before. Utterly consistent, read this is you want to feel dazed and deliriously at peace afterwards.
January 24, 2024
Not sure i understood it well enough to say a ton about it, tho it was cool and weird to read!
February 14, 2025
weird as hell
October 9, 2021
I found this poetry collection interesting--I'm unclear if they are all based on her own dreams, or if she also writes as dreams. Her writing is certainly dreamy, and catches that weird confusion that dreams so often leave one (at least me) with.
The theme that struck me was fitting in--or not fitting in--in language, in knowledge, in "we", in family. Dreams of catastrophe and danger--and not knowing what to do or who to go to or with.
There are also a lot of references to people I do not know much about--Simone Weil, Kant, Bataille, Sylvere Lotringer, Ryan Trecartin. While I know some of these names, I do not know enough about any of them to understand the layers of the poems mentioning them. I also don't watch much tv or movies, so that also goes over my head.
My two favorites:
Wounded Adjudication (p 28)
The Death of Thurston Moore (p 91) (I do know who Thurston Moore is, though I too was more of a Joy Division girl.)
The theme that struck me was fitting in--or not fitting in--in language, in knowledge, in "we", in family. Dreams of catastrophe and danger--and not knowing what to do or who to go to or with.
There are also a lot of references to people I do not know much about--Simone Weil, Kant, Bataille, Sylvere Lotringer, Ryan Trecartin. While I know some of these names, I do not know enough about any of them to understand the layers of the poems mentioning them. I also don't watch much tv or movies, so that also goes over my head.
My two favorites:
Wounded Adjudication (p 28)
The Death of Thurston Moore (p 91) (I do know who Thurston Moore is, though I too was more of a Joy Division girl.)
June 23, 2025
can a book parry catastrophe? / let another temporality be my home! / but death is everywhere in the book
it is unclear to me if the flock of people and I are migrating away from the catastrophe or toward a party
making sweet love inside out little pocket of the void
its not easy being alive / this i know / but sometimes the moon is such that you just kind of slide into the glory / hole that is your life, the brave freewheeling musicality of existence
it is unclear to me if the flock of people and I are migrating away from the catastrophe or toward a party
making sweet love inside out little pocket of the void
its not easy being alive / this i know / but sometimes the moon is such that you just kind of slide into the glory / hole that is your life, the brave freewheeling musicality of existence
September 14, 2022
3.25 stars! Stream of consciousness poetry that accomplished its vision for the most part, but, during the moments it didn’t, I felt very much taken out of the work. Wang is clearly very talented though!
April 15, 2022
Some guy in my grad level English course called this book “pretentious”.
I just thought that was funny.
This is essentially an edited dream journal.
Sometimes a noodle is just evil.
I just thought that was funny.
This is essentially an edited dream journal.
Sometimes a noodle is just evil.
May 16, 2025
3.5 stars because I'm a sweetie and this is sweet poetry sweet as in cool not really as in saccharine more just that it's sweet someone would collect their dreams like this sweet not being condescending either like I do think my being a sweetie means that if I call something sweet that is evidence of an affinity between me and said sweet thing.
Okay, that out of the way let me say that this poetry is very different from the poetry I am currently studying in the class where I am both the pupil and the instructor. Eliot said that past the age of 25, a poet should be less and less concerned with their own personality and more interested in their own historical tradition. You can see this in his poetry, full of voices not his own and methods of subverting emotion, not succumbing to it. Is he right? No, I don't think so. I think what he says makes sense and is a very fruitful thought for any prospective poet, but I do not think this is how all poetry should operate. It's simply too big for that.
Wang's personality IS the poetry here. Except it isn't. Her personality ordered the words, but the images and experiences behind them cannot be credited to Wang the author. Instead, they belong to Wang the dreamer. The author said in an interview that I will not link to that they felt weird saying that they wrote these poems considering they rely so heavily on her unconscious mind. So now an interesting friction is present, these poems are all personality yet we cannot actually pin down who that is. To return to Eliot, it's as though Wang switched the terms around in the chemical catalyst metaphor: her dreaming self is the platinum and her waking self and that self's experiences/memories/hopes are the compounds which when dissolved in dreams form a wonky precipitate. Lakes, prisons, blood, fakers, stages, catastrophes, flowers, lesbians, jump cuts, and evil noodles all sprout from this defined nowhere.
I can definitely see why people may not enjoy this kind of poetry. It's not "like" listening to somebody else's dreams, it quite literally is exactly that most of the time. Sometimes it's a block of prose, sometimes 8 couplets, sometimes free verse, but always (mostly always, I actually most enjoyed the poems that included moments in the waking world or those where the subject itself wasn't a dream even if it included dream content) taking place inside of a dream. Some people are not interested in this. Some could see it as a case of omphaloskepsis. I don't see it like this. Again, "I" is someone else. This is a key feeling in dreams: even if you're the actor, sometimes it feels more like you are the observer of the actor. That's where I think Wang's impulse springs from: a desire to investigate the parts of herself that didn't feel like herself but also were undeniably herself. I also think it came from the timeless impulse of seeing dreams as portentous and pregnant with unconsidered possibilities. A dream is not telling you something you already know. Sometimes it tells you things you would rather not acknowledge, while other times it may present you with a thought you never even thought you could have. "The Luminous Tree" is the most blatant example of this.
I thought it was interesting that these weren't "poetic" dreams, but actual dreams. Dreams have such significance in poetry, not only as a setting but as a symbolic language. Dreams in poems can have very intentional and overwrought meanings. None of that here, Wang is very happy to leave things where they lay, just reporting the facts and letting the reader (herself included) glean some sort of feeling or meaning. I think I would have liked more experimentation with the project, but I understand this was written AFTER a lot of the dreams had already been transcribed, so maybe that wasn't possible. What I mean is I wish there were more of an interplay between the waking mind and its sleepy counterpart rather than the strictly-dream-focused collection we got. It's a risk for sure, but I think it was worth my time and love. If you feel differently, start writing YOUR dreams down!
The drawings are nice and pair well with the material (sketchy like a dream, full of indistinct bodies and shapes) but were they necessary? Probably not.
Okay, that out of the way let me say that this poetry is very different from the poetry I am currently studying in the class where I am both the pupil and the instructor. Eliot said that past the age of 25, a poet should be less and less concerned with their own personality and more interested in their own historical tradition. You can see this in his poetry, full of voices not his own and methods of subverting emotion, not succumbing to it. Is he right? No, I don't think so. I think what he says makes sense and is a very fruitful thought for any prospective poet, but I do not think this is how all poetry should operate. It's simply too big for that.
Wang's personality IS the poetry here. Except it isn't. Her personality ordered the words, but the images and experiences behind them cannot be credited to Wang the author. Instead, they belong to Wang the dreamer. The author said in an interview that I will not link to that they felt weird saying that they wrote these poems considering they rely so heavily on her unconscious mind. So now an interesting friction is present, these poems are all personality yet we cannot actually pin down who that is. To return to Eliot, it's as though Wang switched the terms around in the chemical catalyst metaphor: her dreaming self is the platinum and her waking self and that self's experiences/memories/hopes are the compounds which when dissolved in dreams form a wonky precipitate. Lakes, prisons, blood, fakers, stages, catastrophes, flowers, lesbians, jump cuts, and evil noodles all sprout from this defined nowhere.
I can definitely see why people may not enjoy this kind of poetry. It's not "like" listening to somebody else's dreams, it quite literally is exactly that most of the time. Sometimes it's a block of prose, sometimes 8 couplets, sometimes free verse, but always (mostly always, I actually most enjoyed the poems that included moments in the waking world or those where the subject itself wasn't a dream even if it included dream content) taking place inside of a dream. Some people are not interested in this. Some could see it as a case of omphaloskepsis. I don't see it like this. Again, "I" is someone else. This is a key feeling in dreams: even if you're the actor, sometimes it feels more like you are the observer of the actor. That's where I think Wang's impulse springs from: a desire to investigate the parts of herself that didn't feel like herself but also were undeniably herself. I also think it came from the timeless impulse of seeing dreams as portentous and pregnant with unconsidered possibilities. A dream is not telling you something you already know. Sometimes it tells you things you would rather not acknowledge, while other times it may present you with a thought you never even thought you could have. "The Luminous Tree" is the most blatant example of this.
I thought it was interesting that these weren't "poetic" dreams, but actual dreams. Dreams have such significance in poetry, not only as a setting but as a symbolic language. Dreams in poems can have very intentional and overwrought meanings. None of that here, Wang is very happy to leave things where they lay, just reporting the facts and letting the reader (herself included) glean some sort of feeling or meaning. I think I would have liked more experimentation with the project, but I understand this was written AFTER a lot of the dreams had already been transcribed, so maybe that wasn't possible. What I mean is I wish there were more of an interplay between the waking mind and its sleepy counterpart rather than the strictly-dream-focused collection we got. It's a risk for sure, but I think it was worth my time and love. If you feel differently, start writing YOUR dreams down!
The drawings are nice and pair well with the material (sketchy like a dream, full of indistinct bodies and shapes) but were they necessary? Probably not.
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