We Who Dream by Gwynn O’Gara

At once as “amorous as the dawn” with her “salty, sweet” breath, We Who Dream by Gwynn O’Gara carries the rhythms of love. From the poem “Love Crazed” in which the persona reveals, “you always were a fool about men” to “The Pharaoh’s Daughter,” who confesses, “my only weakness—love,” this is a wonderfully cohesive book of poetry delving into the excesses, joys, and dream-qualities of love and sex/ sex and love. In “The Tent Door Opens and Closes,” the poet offers, “the dark/ vine of a man washes me with pomegranate and aloe,” then leaves us in the dream, wanting yet another in “We Who Dream” with the lines, “Reborn in dream-water/ lovers cradle one another.”

We Who Dream transports us through an unconventional eroticism layered in esotericism but always fertile: “Egos/ entwined at our feet, I dream the first night.”  The book is, indeed, a “home-run moon.”

–Nancy Dafoe, author of Innermost Sea, novella Naimah and Ajmal, and memoir Unstuck in Time.

The poems in We Who Dream strike so many deep chords—intimate, sexual, environmental, mythical, visionary. Gwynn O’Gara’s gift is the unexpected. There are lines that transport the reader to the threshold of the familiar, inspiring visions of what’s possible just beyond; others pirouette on that edge, opening to an utterly different reality. Mating harbor seals become sleeping beauties; a clam slowly unfolds into “secret, stranger, lover, moon.” Ultimately, these poems kindle a connection, take us to our human core where, like paper cranes, we are threaded each to each by miracles, by incantation, by dreams.

–Terry Ehret, author of Lucky Break and Night Sky Journey