Dream Apartment

Despite the title, the poems in Pushcart Prize and Hayden Carruth Award winner Olstein’s (Pain Studies) latest collection are not dreamlike so much as they resemble the process of dreaming. They observe the way one part of a dream segues to another and the way a dream applies to and differs from daily life. These mostly free-verse poems are set in the real but surreptitiously become surreal. “Fort Night,” one of the best poems here, is about a dreamed place where one encounters nightmares that slide into one another: “Is this/ a dream of potential/ unmet, of possibility/undone?” the poet asks as each new line shifts the poem’s meaning. These are poems of enjambment, internal rhyme, and repetition, which revel in figures of sound and have a playful and ironic tone. In an interview, Olstein described “Horse,” in which she becomes a horse, as the “metaphorical thinking” that occurred when she realized that she was being used: “I wanted the lines to tumble down the page like a Jacob’s ladder one hinged to the next, simultaneously orienting and disorienting….”