Friends Dreaming
Friends Dreaming
Miriam Levine
1974
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In Friends Dreaming, Miriam Levine collects the dreams of friends and shapes them into vivid poems. The title poem reads like a play, each voice recounting a dream that reveals inner life and illuminates a waking world that is fluidly alive with risk and hopeful possibility. The voices are intimate, urgent, tender, fearful, vital, and sometimes comic. The dreamers wake from sleep with tales to tell. There are also poems that do not come from dreams. In one, Levine addresses Evelyn Wagler, a victim of murder in Boston in the 1970s, “. . . and still you walk burning . . . you are speaking calmly / hair still burning”; in another, Levine talks back to those who wrongly insist they know what all women need.
From Friends Dreaming
Praise For Miriam Levine’s Writing
“Miriam Levine, as her family used to say, was ‘born with a mouthpiece’, by which the forever-dying world is turned into artful speech and made to live again . . . wonderful.”
“. . . sentences so nearly perfect that they take your breath away.”
“Levine’s poems are organic wholes, strange, beautiful creatures.”
“. . . ghostly vision, guts, and candor . . . splendid.”
“Particularly perceptive and engaging.”
“. . . dazzling . . . indelible and hauntingly real.”
“. . . wonderfully lyrical . . . deep-feeling and well-crafted.”
“Riveting.”
“Miriam Levine is a wonderful and wise writer”