CONNIE MAE OLIVER: DORMILONA at Books Inc. Alameda

Dormilona is a bilingual book of poetry exploring dream states, distance, and the rituals of sleep. In this collection, the fluidity of language reflects the elusive nature of time and memory, centering on matrilineal consciousness and variable notions of home. The ancient forests surrounding Mount Roraima and the bright pink sands of Playa Colorada inhabit the speaker’s dreams, and in these topographies, she finds harmony with brain wave patterns drawn from sleep studies. Meaning both “nightgown” and “sleepyhead” in Venezuelan Spanish, dormilona weaves a neural network linking sleep to matrilineal memory, time, and geography.

Connie Mae Oliver is a poet and artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first book of poems, Cosmos A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan Ann Druyan Steven Soter And Me (Operating System, 2017) is about nuclear disarmament. Her second book, Science Fiction Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) is an homage to Miami-Dade County and color photography in the early aughts. Her first novel, Close Encounters, is forthcoming in 2028 from Texas Review Press.

“The translingual bodymind betrays both standard English and standard Spanish in the name of a “submerged” language that links women and their struggles across oceans and generations. Between family scrapbook and sleep study, dormilona finds a memoir in shards and sings us into the riptide of ancestral synapses, its music “signaling the sadness of a continent.” –URAYOÁN NOEL author of Transversal

“Connie Mae Oliver’s dormilona is a most exquisite dreamscape, mapping complex neuro-pathwaves of love, family, culture, language, sleep, life, and death in the most heart-wrenching and necessary ways. What a profound experience to be awake and in the world at the same time as this book!” –KATIE JEAN SHINKLE author of Tannery Bay and None of This is an Invitation

“A lucid dream, dormilona invites readers to wonder in and out of stars, dream states, pop culture, and the matrilineal relationships that make us. Connie Mae Oliver’s necessary bilingual collection is an astonishing study of loss and love.” –GLORIA MUÑOZ award-winning author of Danzirly and This Is the Year

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