Dreaming My Animal Selves: Le Songe de mes Ames Animales (Bilingual Collection in French and English) - Softcover

Helene Cardona

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908836393 ISBN 13: 9781908836397

Publisher: Salmon Poetry, 2013

Synopsis

Dreaming My Animal Selves is an intriguingly surreal journey through myth, legend, fantasy, and more - all guided by a shape-shifting narrator searching far and wide for cosmic unity within the discontinuous landscape of dream and the dreamy, fragmented quality of the everyday world. The dual-language text (English and French) works to heighten the narrator's shifting perceptions, symbol by symbol, vision by vision.
-Brian Turner
USA Best Book Award in Poetry, Pinnacle Book Award for Best Bilingual Poetry Book and Readers' Favorite Book Award in Poetry. International Book Awards and Julie Suk Award in Poetry Finalist.

About this title

From the Author:

I write as a form of self-expression, fulfillment, transcendence, healing, to transmute pain and experience into beauty.
For me, poetry is a process of self revelation, an exploration of hidden dimensions in myself, and at the same time a way to become myself, a process of individuation I try to create throughout my life - a profound experience of the fundamental interconnection of all in the universe. Moreover, writing is cathartic as it extends a search for peace, for serenity, rooted in a desire to transcend and reconcile the fundamental duality I see in life. Ultimately, I seek expansion of consciousness. The poem is a gesture, a movement, an opening towards a greater truth or understanding. Art brings us to the edge of the incomprehensible. Poetry and life are prayer, enchantment, and transmutation of the being leading to fulfillment. The poems, in their alchemy and geology, are fragments of dreams, enigmas, shafts of light, part myth, and part fable. 

From the Back Cover:

"Liminal, mystical and other-worldly. This is a poet who writes in a rare light." 
~ David Mason, poet laureate of Colorado and author of The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize) and The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award)

"In this extraordinary volume of soul crafted poetry, words become wands to enchant and evoke our better angels."
~ Jean Houston, Ph.D., world-renowned mythologist, philosopher, author of The Wizard of Us and Mystical Dogs

"an intriguingly surreal journey through myth, legend, fantasy, and more... a book centered in joy, rooted firmly in the wild landscape of the imagination." 
~ Brian Turner, winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise

"Here is the work of one moving from geography to geography, tongue to tongue, and into singular metaphysical experiences that change like her animal companions. ...at once imaginary, wistful, and often rapturous" 
~ Willis Barnstone, author of The Restored New Testament 

"Taking her queue from Rilke, she has captured dreams in a diglottism of the soul, a literary isthmus of heliotrope and honeysuckle... to arrive at a point of insight where we are all enriched."
~ Thomas McCarthy, winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, author of The Last Geraldine Officer, Merchant Prince, and Mr Dineen's Careful Parade: New and Selected Poems

About this edition

• Publisher: Salmon Poetry
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1908836393
• ISBN 13: 9781908836397
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 80