Sweetheart's flying solo. Ate too much Adderall, now it's time she tiptoed through the needle's eye. A percussive music carries four blocks to Gizzard's and slows the rise of his bread.   It shrouds the hemlock in the hills.

Dreamlife of a Philanthropist

 by Janet Kaplan

 University of Notre Dame Press

 amazon.com

winner of the 2011

Ernest Sandeen Prize

in Poetry

Praise for Dreamlife

"'The mind's no place for a life,' writes Janet Kaplan, nudging reason off the stool where it had sat so preciously balanced. Some poems seek to rewire the mechanism of their own creation; and here, in poems whose wit cannot be told apart from their momentum, we find thinking at work against itself, undoing conclusion, battling intent, in order to recover some lost ground of form's unconscious foundation. The ambition is high, though humble as you read it. Kaplan is capable of cosmogonic play and radical domesticity (as if one were different from the other). The poems here hover above their own titles, this dreamlife of the poem more important than the poem itself, a place in which thinking is notyet thought, intent not yet conclusive, not language even as a form of life, but language in the process of making that life possible. It isn't a mental life; it is too real for that easy confine. Let's just call it the necessary life - a life of serious play."   - Dan Beachy-Quick

"Composed of (often comestible) daily objects made strange, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist bears echoes of ekphrasis and takes its cue from both the linguistically excitable and fabular lineages of the prose poem. Kaplan challenges the prose poem form by dividing many of her pieces into 14 numbered sections - an unrhymed sonnet riff - or by writing into her titles, ending, rather than beginning, with the thrust of naming. As such, Dreamlife employs the poem-as-object while slyly evading its containment. And the voice here charms, leading us into a landscape of Tender Buttons meets Claes Oldenburg or Rene Magritte." - Karla Kelsey

Praise for poems in Dreamlife 

"Little Theory" is one of four examples of prose poems that "say most of what needs to be said about what a prose poem 'is' in this century." - Inaugural online issue of The Prose-Poem Project, www.prose-poems.com

"'One can like form or one can like chaos.' That is a wonderful sentence, one I'm going to remember for a long time.... It seems evident...that in this taxonomy, Kaplan likes form. But she loves the feeling that chaos is near. And it's that dichotomy, exactly, that draws me so powerfully to this work." - Ron Silliman