Dream of the Gone-From City treads the fault lines between worlds: internal and external, natural and constructed, past and present. “Blessed am I when neither here nor there” Edelman writes, probing borders between mothers and daughters, lovers tracing words in sand, the living and the dead. Infused with intelligence and sly humor, these poems travel from Malibu to the Adirondacks to Bordeaux, France, weaving disco, Shakespeare, and nursery rhymes into their exquisitely crafted lyric narratives.
Dream of the Gone-From City is available to purchase via University of Chicago Press, Amazon, Bookshop.org and other booksellers.
REVIEWS
“Barbara Edelman’s first full-length collection, with flaring intelligence and elegant ingenuity, argues against our complacency even as we fulfill purposes that remain largely unknown to ourselves. Edelman’s urban landscapes are cleanly told, brightest at the lonely edges where we find ourselves in the company of restless, clear-eyed survivors living by wit and split-second generosity, migrating ceaselessly toward reconciliation, the hard world’s un/making, “every cell an insurrection. Every misheard word a revolution.” Dream of the Gone-From City is a beautiful, long-awaited debut.”
—Dorothy Barresi, author of American Fanatics, Rouge Pulp, Post-Rapture Diner, All of the Above
“DREAM OF THE GONE-FROM CITY is brilliant—as in intelligent, smart, astute. It is brilliant—as in vivid, intense, luminous. Part dream, part reminiscence, part elegy–every part of this marvelous book is filled with dazzlement—the verve of image, the precision of the verb, the beauty and breadth of loss. Sometimes I stopped reading—dazzled.”
—Lynn Emanuel, author of The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected; Noose and Hook; Then, Suddenly; Hotel Fiesta
“Held together by jump-cuts, by sleights, by the laws of mathematics as applied to the horizon, the journey to the gone-from city is surrounded by forest. Do not miss this smart and grave book.”
—Marsha de la O, author of Antidote for Night and Black Hope
Reviews
Sharon Fagan McDermott, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“If, as Mary Oliver once wrote, ‘Poetry is a life-cherishing force … ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread to the hungry,’ then Barbara Edelman’s ‘Dream of the Gone-From City’ is such a gift, offering the reader a way to acknowledge the losses we all must face, while celebrating the tenacity and beauty of the human spirit.”
Fred Shaw, Pittsburgh City Paper
“The stellar mix of wordplay and imagery points to life’s complicated nature. . .As in much of Dream…, Edelman uses physical and mental loss as an effective means to contemplate formative time spent with meaningful others.”
Kris B. Hoffler, Raleigh Review
“These poems explore the idea of memory having an unspoken subtext of the word “loss” within it. On the other hand, it also has an opposing context of “gain” in that it brings something lost back into a ghostly existence, no matter how altered from its original state”
Barbara Edelman 