Sleep Gate

In Sleep Gate, Sylvia Legris descends into biological dreaming itself: the sleep beneath sleep, where the dream under the dream / is the dream of plants. Taking up Inger Christensens summons to dream our way inward, and H.D.s insistence that the dream is no poetic phantasy / but a biological reality, these poems dissolve the waking world into the fabric of sleep, drawing the natural and the built alike into its slow respiration. Animating a whole taxonomy of sleepers – a ruby-throated hummingbird whose dream is a nest hinging on spider silk, a honeybee with perfect recall of citrus one thousand and fifty-seven flowers ago, an earthworm fleeing by slow peristaltic wave – Legris follows sleep through phylum and season. Sensuous, Latinate and strange, this extraordinary collection captures the disjunctive, jump-cutting logic of dreams, leaping from a time before the clouds are inventoried to winters gnashing bruxism, and assembles the world, as one does on waking, through distortion and towards clarity.