Dream Apartment

Lisa Olstein’s Dream Apartment moves between lucid dream and living nightmare. In one poem, the speaker enters a thought experiment as a mother lynx who encounters a bear; in another, “a real-life bogeyman” follows the speaker home. In “Prey,” “Having “looked / in the flashing / eyes of a man / turned animal,” the speaker “fled like prey / fled his shadowed / tunnel gaze / his glinting flick / of eye and tongue.”

Fear works side by side with collective grief: these are pandemic-era poems. In “Host” the speaker asks, “How / many days since, how many days till, how / will we hold these losses, with both hands?” The ungrieved in “Our City Has Become a Series of Islands” are “a congregation / of ghosts.” The speaker addresses the void: “Dear Monster / none of the guests / we invited arrive. / In the darkness / no lion comes.”

The spacious sequence “Night Secretary” directly examines the workings of the relentless mind:

trying to reason through

 (faulty reason   \   fallacies)

alone

 on her own

 is

 this night secretary’s work
 

In waking hours, the speaker “commun[es] with an ant” while “beautifully high,” and even the visceral turns cerebral:

something about the way with her bare hands
the chef on TV caressed the naked inside

of the slaughtered sow made watching
its body come apart into cuts all right

except for the head because the line
drawn in me is apparently the thoughts.

A formal restlessness echoes the particularities of this mind at work. Olstein moves between haibuns, short-lined enjambments, and concrete poems shaped like arrows. Sonic riffs propel the collection: vessel morphs into vassal, plum meets plumb as sound shapes the mind’s momentum. Wit, word play, and tonal shifts abound, as in the undercut move of “Spell,” when an elevated lyricism turns:

The love gold as any honey hived around me—
The pills I took—

The pills I didn’t take—
The doctors, the needles, the vials, the scripts—