The Sleep Hotel

Amy Newlove Schroeder's perfect title for her debut volume, The Sleep Hotel, is a guiding metaphor. These poems rise from the other side of the mirror, from the dream establishment we check into and out of each night. These poems rise from the startling, uninhibited speech below consciousness, then are boldly crafted, as dream logic lifts into wide-awake fire. These are passionate, radically beautiful poems, heartbreak hotel in somatic heaven: so inventive and freshly expressive they hand us, as if dropped from the famous extended hand of John Keats, the key to pure wonder. -- Carol Muske-Dukes