About the Book:

Dreams of the Living has poems in it which I wrote as early as 2001, but the book really began to take shape in 2007 while I was obtaining my MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona.The book is an intensely personal response to the death of my mother in 2004, and the death of my partner in 2006. It is an exploration of the intricacies of grief, the body, and the intangibility of all things.

The ‘I’ of Lisa M. Cole’s collection is invested with the weight of its construction and re-forming over a lifetime marked by violent loss and betrayals of body and heart. In Dreams of the Living, the poet speaks with her bodyheart, an organ that was never betrayed, as attuned to goddesses and ghosts as it is to the sensory world of sunlight, breath, and scars. – Wendy Burk

Where else but Lisa M. Cole’s Dreams of the Living would one wander through nocturnes in a “body as bomb shelter” among darkened apothecaries and blue-diamond clocks? This book is a gift of the esoteric wedded to the symbolic, our doppelgangers as guests in attendance. An artist of simultaneity and lament, Cole’s Dreams of the Living gives us the Zen garden and the scarred winter, a moontime recollection of that state between loss and sleep. -Jon Riccio