Dreams of the Living

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.

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Praise for Dreams of the Living

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

About the Author

Lisa M. Cole is the author of the poetry collections Heart Full of Tinders and Dreams of the Living; both from ELJ Publications; both scheduled to appear in 2015. Lisa is also a contributor to Wood Becomes Bone: A Mental Health Awareness Series, forthcoming this August from ELJ Publications. Lisa has also written seven chapbooks; most recently Negotiating with Objects from Sundress Publications; The Bodyscape from Dancing Girl Press, & the forthcoming Living in a Lonely House also from Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming in December of this year. She was a recipient of the Lois Nelson Award in Creative Non-Fiction in 2005, & was a runner-up in SLAB’s Elizabeth R. Curry poetry contest earlier in 2014. When not writing, Lisa teaches writing workshops in Tucson Arizona’s prisons as well as in various places within Tucson’s vibrant literary communities, including the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and Casa Libre En La Solona.

Dreams of the Living

Praise for Dreams of the Living

About the Author

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