The Sunflower Cast a Spell To Save Us From The Void
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY
The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this extraordinary debut, Wang (Carceral Capitalism) creates a symbolist dream diary for catastrophic times. A cross between Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's elliptical poetic treatises and Marosa di Giorgio's fevered fables, Wang tells stories that begin in clarity but unfurl into complex landscapes, exploring the role of projection and imagination in our relationships. "People don't believe that the butterfly stays with me and their disbelief makes me crazy," Wang writes in "Companion Species." "They think I'm making it up so I take my foot out of my shoe and there she is, little yellow wings." In "The Resurrection of Angela," the familiar scene of the overlong poetry reading pivots as the speaker takes the stage "carrying Angela, my decapitated angel... She is dead but I do not know why or how she passed." The book engages with climate change and the apocalyptic, asking, "Can a book parry catastrophe?" At another point, Wang observes, "I have been having such strange and beautiful dreams lately," and readers will be grateful for these potent, dreamlike reflections.
