“The image that set this poem in motion came from a video I happened upon online when I should have been sleeping: a large snake slowly swallowing a doe, some hunters standing around watching, all of it impossible-seeming and saturated in a dream-like way. I’m intrigued by dream logic in a very concrete sense: by the recurring dreams that inhabit us particularly but that many of us share, by the taxonomies and associative architectures dreams reveal, and by instances when waking life is uncannily dream-like not in the sense of a watered down adjective for soft-focus or aspirational, but as enacted and unnerving portraits, portals, inventions. I wanted this poem to both explore and manifest some of those questions and qualities.”
—Lisa Olstein