LISA OLSTEIN

Dream Apartment

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

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.
                                                                                                    ―Preposition

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.
                                                                                                    ―The Rumpus

Lisa Olstein’s Dream Apartment moves between lucid dream and living nightmare… 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.
                                                                                                    ―Poetry Foundation

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 

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

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.”