Dream Pop Origami - by Jackson Bliss (Paperback)

About the Book

Award-winning actress & director Regina King called Jackson Bliss "the Kendrick Lamar of the literary world." DREAM POP ORIGAMI is a lyrical memoir about mixed-race identity, love, travel, AAPI masculinities, & metamorphosis.

Book Synopsis

Dream Pop Origami is a beautiful, ambitious, interactive, and engrossing lyrical memoir about mixed-race identity, love, travel, AAPI masculinities, and personal metamorphosis. This experimental work of creative nonfiction examines, celebrates, and complicates what it means to be Asian and white, Nisei and hapa, Midwestern and Californian, Buddhist and American at the same time. In this stunning collection of choose-your-own-essays and autobiographical lists, multiracial identity is a counterpoint of memory, language, reflection, and imagination intersecting and interweaving into a coherent tapestry of text, emotion, and voice. A stylized, modern retelling of Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book!

One of the most revolutionary aspects of Dream Pop Origami is the way it gives readers the agency, the freedom, and the responsibility to choose what the next chapter is but also what the memoir becomes based on the decisions they make and the chapters they read. In a literal sense, readers direct this memoir. They decide the level of heartache, nostalgia, joy, infatuation, and melancholy it contains. They decide when to follow the rules of autobiographical storytelling and when to transgress them, when to harness the narrative technology of the personal essay and when to embrace the simplicity of the autobiographical list.

At its heart, Dream Pop Origami is a powerful, vulnerable, audacious, and cyclical process granting author, narrator, and reader their own complex subjectivity, contradiction, and irreconcilability. Each new reading of this memoir is simultaneously an affirmation of the inherent contradiction of the self: there can be no singular, static narrative subject or singular, static narrative object. There can also be no singular, static reader. Author and reader, narrator and interpreter are all part of an important dance for the construction of meaning and identity.

Review Quotes

"Jackson Bliss seems to have dispatched DREAM POP ORIGAMI from a future where technically adventurous nonfiction blends so perfectly with vulnerable self-discovery that it's impossible to imagine the two functioning without each other...Bliss has made a memoir about how to nurture the different worlds that occupy a self that is beautiful, fascinating, heartbreaking, essential." -John D'Agata, A New History of an Essay

"The crackling sound you hear is me feverishly and compulsively turning the pages of Jackson Bliss' utterly original, genre defying riff on autobiography, memory, language and detail...From an exploration of video games to Tibetan higher planes, Bliss expresses the varied ways in which the second sight of his hapa artist self animates the landscape, while taking readers on a journey through unabashed emotion, memory and a life lived with intensity and great feeling." -Marie Mutsuki Mockett, American Harvest

"Bliss masterfully captures the kaleidoscopic gymnastics of his multicultural (hapa) identity, inviting the reader into humorous, heartbreaking, and insightful moments strung along a choose your own adventure." -Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark; Where We Go When All We Were is Gone

"Take a life and fold it in half then fold that half into another half; keep going until there is nothing left. Make it into something beautiful, dreamed, imagined; it can be any vision you want, that is, until it's time to take it apart, to examine just how such a self was constructed. You'll never be the same dreamer again. Jackson Bliss nonetheless exposes the creases, the wearing away of self and soul, the deterioration of appearances and the texture of the fragile nature of the idealized self against the reality into which we are constructed. Do you want to do this? he seems to ask, allowing us to spy or avert our eyes. If life is an adventure, what does it mean when you have to unfold, uncrease, unravel, destroy your life in order to live it? With candor and honesty, Bliss investigates how plans go awry, how following the pattern never leads to the perfection we seek. DREAM POP ORIGAMI is a beautifully made star. See for yourself." -Jenny Boully, Betwixt & Between: Essays on the Writing Life; The Body: An Essay

"In DREAM POP ORIGAMI, ceaseless migrations and reincarnations actualize playful transformation tales just like the samadhi of freedom folds across any and all barriers." -Duncan Ryuken Williams, American Sutra; Hapa Japan

"By turns sly, sorrowful, pensive, and forthright, DREAM POP ORIGAMI makes us rethink the possibilities of nonfiction writing, and of how we name and shape our identities." -Beth (Bich Minh) Nguyen, Stealing Buddha's Dinner

"At the risk of sounding trite, this book is just so much fun! But...fun is just a diversion tactic for DREAM POP ORIGAMI's honest profundity and Jackson Bliss's expert storytelling. Each adventure is delivered in its most perfect form, ready for your interactive pleasure: To feel the complicated pleasure of nostalgia, go to chapter 22. To feel the adolescent pleasure of a game, go to chapter 28. To feel the naughty pleasure of reading Jackson Bliss's prose, go to chapter 35. To fulfill satisfaction, read this book." -Lily Hoang, A Bestiary

"DREAM POP ORIGAMI moves with an exuberant voice that keeps on singing, because it knows there might not be anything on the other side of singing, and what do we have left but gameplay, lists, quizzes, graphs, and a valentine kind of love for the dying world? It's exactly the kind of company I need right now." -Paul Lisicky, Later: My Life at the Edge of the World