LISA OLSTEIN

Dream Apartment

An eerie, challenging collection. 
                                                                                                    ―The Washington Post Book Club

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....” At their best, these poems work their magic through just such a sequential movement.
                                                                                                    ―Library Journal 

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...In waking hours, the speaker “commun[es] with an ant” while “beautifully high,” and even the visceral turns cerebral... 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—
                                                                                                    ―Poetry Foundation

To read Lisa Olstein’s fifth book of poetry, Dream Apartment (Copper Canyon, 2023), is to enter a vortex parallel to dreamscape. Like dreams, the poems hold their own logic. They seem to ask as a whole this question: “What poems take shape in proximity to night?” Dream Apartment is a deeply associative and language-forward collection. Olstein exemplifies what it looks like for a poet to play, even when play is in the presence of tragedy and grief, or when play is the serious kind that teaches us something essential Formally, the poems explore a kaleidoscope of shapes and sizes, sprawling across whole sections in the form of arrows or distilled into skinny slips tumbling down the page like a Jacob’s Ladder. Sonically, they skip and skid from sound to sound, conjuring spell and lullaby both: “Render tender the shoots / of evening, let us in the lettuce // light, fitful as fish pumping / fistfuls of razored air, jagged.” These poems are not dream recordings or explanations, says Olstein, but they do play in a similar way. Images and animals show up as beings unto themselves and as doors into rooms we didn’t know existed.
                                                                                                    ―The Rumpus

W.B. Yeats wrote that “we make out of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” In Dream Apartment, her 2023 book of poetry from Copper Canyon Press, Lisa Olstein does exactly this. Our country breathes an atmosphere of ceaseless rhetoric, in which the distillation of dirt-stained thought into a purer language feels ever more difficult, if not impossible. We are buried in words, most of them rhetorical...The steely sharp scythe of poetry gets dulled to a blunt instrument. Or it becomes the equivalent of downloading stock photographic images from Google and uploading them to your document...Into this surfeit of mind-numbing meaning comes Olstein, clear eyed, to restore the dignity of the quarrel with oneself. Olstein is a nimble post-modernist, afraid neither of the couplet nor the broken line on a scattershot page. Clarity and half-meaning both have their prerogatives in her poetry...The poet creates her personal lyric mode, one that uses a combination of disjunction and snappy aphorism to create a portrait of ‘her’ mind. We are offered intimacy, yet one distilled through her ever self-seeking, ever self-evading restlessness.
                                                                                                    ―Merion West

In Dream Apartment, the solipsism of the late ’90s and early 2000s...yields to a decentered self enmeshed, like roots in soil, in a fecund world of death, baby shit, feral dogs, the musk of men, slaughtered pigs, and cats which eat their owners. How, Olstein asks, can human consciousness matter amid such matter? Is it not the height of hubris, she wonders, to presume that we can somehow “flee the kingdom?” In a poem by that name, Olstein adumbrates her notion of de-prioritized human consciousness across one of the most impressive series of enjambments I have ever encountered...Elegiac for both self and species, Dream Apartment names, as a title, the overlapping and inter-animation of interior and exterior structures. Through brilliant enjambment, agile movement, textural acoustics, and rhythmic mastery, Olstein delivers a skilled yet deeply felt portrait of existential and ecological extinction, making the book an important marker of a shift from “weird” to “worldly,” from “ludic” to “lucid.”
                                                                                                    ―Preposition

Dream Apartment is a collection of poems structured across seven clusters of sharp lyrics, each of which stretch out across incredible distances...There is such an interesting shift in tone, rhythm and effect through her evolution of lyric structures, one that allows for the larger shape of the collection to emerge out of shared purpose amid myriad structures...each shape and pattern attends uniquely to the music of each line, offering a precise and dreamy effect through her examinations, and even negotiations, on how one lives or might live in the world.
                                                                                                    ―Rob McLennan's Blog

Devoted equally to the long arc and the sharp fragment, Lisa Olstein’s fifth collection maps the lucid ache at the center of night where “darkness stands in / for light,” certain heartbreaks never end, and love dovetails with losing. Immersed in ode as much as elegy, Dream Apartment employs a dynamic range of forms. Prayer-like spells cascade down the page with precision and abandon. Arrow-shot elegies explore the shock of suicide and find echoes in other kinds of grief—individual and communal, animal and ecological, sudden and creeping. Agile narratives mirror the dazzling associative movement of unselfconscious thought, the dreaming mind, “bodiless memory.” Whether watching a stranger carry his dead dog out of a vet’s exam room or offering bouquets of peonies to night-foraging rabbits, Dream Apartment is propelled by the way poems, like dreams, unfold new dimensions of time and space. Casting their lines toward wish and repair, recognition and reckoning, these poems reveal how any meditation on loss is an exploration of love, promising that in “dreaming, something wakes.”