Praise for Jeff Latosik’s Dreampad:
“Jeff Latosik makes visible the digital ‘labyrinth of looking’ and clicking, where ‘music seems to spy’ on all of us. In Dreampad, the intricate interiority of the speaker interfaces with relentless technology. Memories are retrieved from the cloud. Tenderness blossoms in the matrix. Latosik’s poems—inquisitive, dazzling—warn against and show us how to survive in the noise and blur of Now.” —Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning
“The poems in Jeff Latosik’s Dreampad, like the technologies they reference, sing but also sample, reverberate, crackle with static, and sound alarms. There are ‘keyboard taps and singular cash register riffs,’ ‘noise machines set to heartbeat,’ and the titular pillow, a product that plays soothing music. The ‘touchpad of options’ in this book includes the lyric and the conversational, the analytical and the imagistic, and Latosik deftly balances these approaches and impulses. This poet is truly inventive, and what he offers us in Dreampad is a ‘remixing’ of this life as we know it, ‘a clarifying/of the predicament.’ Suddenly there is so much to learn, so much that poems—these poems—have to tell us.” —Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
“These leaping, associative poems move in ‘spacetime,’ where everything is simultaneiously connected and disconnected, and memory cuts in and out on a spotty signal. ‘It’s not that I have something to say,’ writes Latosik, ‘It’s that an ailment made a voice.’ And what a voice! Combining a big reach for liminal spaces with thrillingly precise description, his poems move nimbly between the ephemeral and the familiar, even when the bridge between them is shaking: ‘. . . reality . . . kept moving in and out of view . . .” he reminds us, ‘. . . as if stuck on one of those terrible hot-dog carousels.'” —Julie Bruck, author of Monkey Ranch
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