The Dream of Reason

May 15, 2018

"Everything is restored," says an early poem in this debut from George, winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, but a creeping sense of unease upends the collection. The bat crawling across the porch "like a goblin" is dying, never mind the accompanying image of being enfolded in someone's arms; something unseen stirs in the grass; and the disturbing sense of being watched on a starlit night portends violence--a word that resurfaces throughout the collection ("I take my violence out over the field"). That's not surprising, as the title hints at an unsettling Goya print, and it's interesting to see how such tactile poems succeed at suggesting the uncertain beyond, in a world where "we know a thing by its periphery." VERDICT Eerie and approachable; solid work from a rising poet.

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Starred review from May 21, 2018
George’s shimmering, mystical, and incisive debut reaches into the ether of the human experience and illuminates the irrational nature of emotions. She investigates imprisonment, violence, and loss of innocence in a universe governed by fluxes of psychological noise and disillusionment escapable only in fleeting moments of stillness: “Someone strikes a match. Briefly/ the Earth is illuminated.” Addressing interrelated forms of mental and physical imprisonment, George describes a crated pig in a slaughterhouse, noting how the captive animal’s “brain does not conceive/ of turning. But after farrowing,/ back in the pen with the others,/ she’ll circle herself for days/ trying to bite her own tail.” She also writes of violence as a singular, ravenous organism feeding off a seduction that “has many rooms/ like graves and like graves/ they are all connected.” George portrays the irrevocable loss of innocence as an “ocean that keeps/ on breaking,” with deliverance arriving only through the mercy of dreams: “All sleeping things are children.” She also displays a refreshing sense of humility given her enlightened vision, recognizing that “outside, other windows in other houses/ glowed with their own electric dreams.” George’s jewel of a collection acts as both a catalyst and antidote for philosophical ruminations, one that will keep readers asking themselves, “The great event—has it already occurred?”