dormilona - An Evening with Connie Mae Oliver

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Tombolo Books welcomes poet Connie Mae Oliver to the bookstore for a celebration of her poetry collection, dormilona, during National Poetry Month! Oliver will be in conversation with St. Petersburg's Poet Laureate Gloria Muñoz.

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.

“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

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.

Gloria Muñoz is the author of Your Biome Has Found You and Danzirly, which won the Ambroggio Prize and the Florida Gold Medal Book Award for Poetry. She is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, a Hedgebrook Fellow, a Macondista, a Highlights Foundation Diverse Verse Fellow, and a part of Las Musas. This Is the Year is her debut novel. Visit her online at gloriamunoz.com and on Instagram at @bygloriamunoz.

Host or Publisher Tombolo Books