THE EXHAUST of DREAMS ADULTERATED Poemsby Jane Rosenberg Laforge

In her fifth full-length poetry collection Jane Rosenberg LaForge declares “I realize in context / I have given up on significance.” Nevertheless, she takes her readers on a deep and unsparing dive into her family and heritage, admitting that in chronicling the final years of her parents’ marriage and lives “I am looking for myself.” When she asks her father what he is thinking, often he answers “Everything / I would have done differently,” and the dreams of what might have been haunt the inhabitants of her narrative, along with the consequences of choices made by forbears where “we all / would have to reap the results of this whirlwind.” Still, she describes how the sunrises and sunsets of her native California youth were rendered “spectacular in / those days, when dust / was a euphemism for / the junk and alloys we / poured into the air, and for / the stubborn debris of / humans: the skin we shed that insects won’t eat, and the exhaust of dreams / adulterated.” There is, then, beauty in our detritus, and the satisfaction of survival at the end of our haphazard journeys.

Megan Leonard (she/they) is the author of Larkspur Queen (Broadstone Books) and book of lullabies (Milk & Cake Press), as well as the chapbooks Dear ______ (Milk & Cake Press), and where the body ends (Platypus Press). Meg’s work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Fourth River, SWWIM, and Tupelo Quarterly, and she is the recipient of the Prospero Prize in Poetry and the Puerto del Sol Prize; her work has been nominated for Best of the Net. Meg lives in coastal New Hampshire, where she works as a writing mentor both privately and for the University of New Hampshire. Though primarily a poet, Meg also enjoys visual art and prose, and themes in Meg’s work often include disability and chronic illness, mental illness, madness, motherhood, and dark little fairy tales. Meg lives with her spouse and children, as well as two cats, a tortoise, and a bearded dragon.