Dreamwake, by Kelly Jones

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Dreamwake explores the liminal spaces between trauma, memory, and the mind at rest. By examining everyday occurrences both mundane and extraordinary, the poems in this collection aim to make sense of the shocks of modern life by mining dreams for meaning.

Simultaneously serious and playful, these poems examine environmental destruction, assault, and illness with an eye for irony, nods to pop culture, and an interest in cultural paradigms. Dreamwake is a bold challenge to patriarchal norms, exploring consciousness and memory while leaving readers to wonder which of the disturbing images are imagined and which are all too real.

The collection weaves together personal trauma, movie references, and contemporary existential threats with a lucid dream logic, drawing connections as they spin between experiences, memories, and situations. Common themes within these twenty-two poems include fraught family dynamics, the impossible standards of womanhood, and the perils of life in the Anthropocene. In contrast to the ambiguous narrative contents, the writing style is pointed and decisive, eschewing ornamentation in favor of a direct, plainspoken style. Forms vary across the poems, ranging from something resembling a sonnet to tightly-balled prose poems. Several of the poems share titles, or very nearly do, reinforcing the half-remembered perspective of the collection.

Kelly Jones (they/she) is a writer and librarian from Raleigh, North Carolina who currently calls New Orleans home. They serve on the operations team of TELEPHONE (an international arts experiment) and as a poetry reader for Passengers Journal. Some of their poems have recently appeared in Hymn for the Living Poet Vol. III, Peauxdunque Review, Ghost City Review, and Bone Parade and their essay on why the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer film is actually great recently appeared in Drunk Monkeys. Prior to becoming a librarian, Kelly ghostwrote web content and worked a variety of positions within the service industry, academia, and the nonprofit sector. Some of Kelly's favorite things are manatees, glitter, and drinks with crushed ice. You can find them on Instagram @glitter.feast, where they feed the algorithms by posting photos of graffiti, good light, street cats, and other random scenes.