I'm here to learn to dream in your language

by H. L. Hix

Overview

In lyric sequences that record a lover's dreams and a dreamer's loves, I'm here to learn to dream in your language extends H. L. Hix's ongoing poetic inquiry into spiritual and sexual ecstasy.

That house that season was inhabited,

though I was not. That house that year was not haunted, but I was.
The creek tendered cattails, pebbles, turtles.

The cattails issued redwings and also lent their raspy voice
to the breeze the blackbirds animated.

H. L. Hix lives with the poet Kate Northrop in the mountain west, in an 1880s railroad house, writing in a studio that once was a barn.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780989753203
Publisher:	Etruscan Press
Publication date:	02/03/2015
Pages:	103
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

H. L. Hix lives with the poet Kate Northrop in the mountain west, in an 1880s railroad house, and writes in a studio that once was a barn.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents


Dream Legend 8
Dream Lullaby 14
Dream Logic 18
Dream Lexicon 54
Dream Longing 70

Editorial Reviews

12/15/2014
Prolific and philosophically ambitious, Hix (As Much As, if Not More Than) offers some of his most beautiful lines in years in his second collection of the year. Short poems about pain, loss, and absence return to the resonant monostichs at which he excels, some chthonically mysterious, some funny. The fantastic, eccentric “Dream Lexicon” comprises 135 imaginative definitions for single words: “spigot,” for example, means “a man with a mallet making measured movements against oak to give discreet vent to the vintage within.” And the sweepingly confident sonnet sequence “Dream Logic,” written in response to Hix’s interviews with other contemporary writers, unfolds into a sheaf of aphorisms fit for quoting on their own: “Even on cold nights, not all brilliance mimics the crystalline.” Hix has a reputation for books conceived as projects, sometimes at the expense of individual poems. Here, though, the poems can stand alone, none more so than the arresting portraits and spare inquiries of the book’s varied final segment, “Dream Longing,” where long scenic couplets alternate with short-lined abstractions, each presenting absence; haunting, erotic loss; or symbols for them all: “hand-me-down dinnerware that stood/ first for hope, then in place of memory.” Hix is at best stunningly inventive, at worst prolix—regardless, there’s a lot to like. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly