Through the poems in The Dream Women Called, Lori Wilson attends to
the spirits of depression, uncertainty, and fear while wondering at the
beauty in what's broken, the remarkable in the ordinary, and the balm
that the natural world can offer. Following a single speaker, we're
reminded how many lives one woman can live.
This book is about crossing into a new version of your own story--after
a marriage ends, the parents die, the children are grown, or the faith
is discarded--and finding a place to stand, a new way to take up space
in the world. Uniting past and present, these poems create multifaceted
portraits, particularly of relationships between mothers and daughters.
Wilson's poems sift through memory, dreams, art, imagination, nature,
and close observation, turning each discovery over in order to see it
fully. Beneath the fine-grained imagery of these lyric excavations are
the sometimes opposing but fundamental desires to be whole and to be
seen, which often means looking within as well as turning toward the
world outside. The speaker is listening always for the dream women who
call, for whatever may beckon from the present and future, preparing her
in some way for a life that's truly hers.
