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Cover of The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void

The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void

by Jackie Wang

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Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.In The Sunflower, Wang follows the sunflower's many dream guises-its evolving symbolism in literature, society, and the author's own dream life using a mathopoetic technique to generate poems using the Fibonacci sequence (a pattern found in the seed spirals of sunflower). The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void embodies what Wang calls oneiric poetry: a poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams. Although dreams, in psychoanalytic discourse, have been conceptualized as a window into the unconscious, Wang's poetry emphasizes the social dimension of dreams, particularly the use of dreams to index historical trauma and social processes.

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"As the title suggests, this poetry collection – a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award – is full of surreal, whimsical images. They come from the mind of author Jackie Wang, who takes on the grand task of documenting her dreams through poetry. When I spoke to her earlier this year, she mentioned reading about people’s pandemic dreams working as a sort of “collective” expression of restlessness during lockdown; many were dreaming about “bugs,” “disease spreading” or “invisible senses of evil.” Using the motif of the sunflower as a guide to her subconscious, Wang shows us how social processes and traumas show up in our dreams and how we can better understand ourselves by tuning in to them."
NPR Books We Love — 2021 · apps.npr.org
Publishers Weekly's Best Books — 2021 · publishersweekly.com