Dormilona - by Connie Mae Oliver (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

dormilona is a bilingual book of poetry exploring dream states, distance, and the rituals of sleep in Venezuelan culture. In these poems, the fluidity of living in two languages reflects the elusive nature of time and memory, centering on the speaker's relationship with her mother, grandmother, and homeland. The ancient forests around Mount Roraima and the bright pink sands of Playa Colorada inhabit her dreams, and in these topographies she finds harmony with the patterns of brain waves in her sleep studies. Meaning both "nightgown" and "sleepyhead" in Venezuelan Spanish, dormilona weaves a neural network linking sleep to language memory, family, geography, and history.

Review Quotes

"The translingual bodymind betrays both standard English and standard Spanish in the name of a 'submerged' language that links women and their struggles across oceans and generations. Between family scrapbook and sleep study, dormilona finds a memoir in shards and sings us into the riptide of ancestral synapses, its music 'signaling the sadness of a continent.'"

-URAYOÁN NOEL author of Transveral

"Connie Mae Oliver's dormilona is a most exquisite dreamscape, mapping complex neuro-pathwaves of love, family, culture, language, sleep, life, and death in the most heart-wrenching and necessary ways. What a profound experience to be awake and in the world at the same time as this book!"

-KATIE JEAN SHINKLE author of Tannery Bay and None of This is an Invitation

"A lucid dream, dormilona invites readers to wonder in and out of stars, dream states, pop culture, and the matrilineal relationships that make us. Connie Mae Oliver's necessary bilingual collection is an astonishing study of loss and love."

-GLORIA MUÑOZ award-winning author of Danzirly and This Is the Year