Dream’s Hold by Emily Saunders Nguyen

In this deeply distinguished manuscript, the transience and permanence of identity and experience as well as visions of the natural world rise like holographic images, evanescent and arresting before our eyes. Emily Nguyen has married eastern and western attitudes and philosophy and combined her insights with profound and long study to create a volume of poems that is both unique and unforgettable.

–Elizabeth Anne Socolow, Barnard Poetry Prize-winning author of Laughing at Gravity, Conversations with Isaac Newton, and 9 other books of poetry.

Emily Saunders Nguyen straddles the fault-line of touch in Dream’s Hold. Escorted by a lyric presence wonderfully alive and wise and in pain, we know that at any moment the world could open and swallow us. Yet this poet is the “rabbit of the wind” who lifts a leaf here, lowers a branch there, and cannily nibbles holes in the world to go through, feeling her way physically and emotionally. We follow, exhilarated and at the same time disturbed. The speaker’s cri de coeur sounds throughout, and meaning “hangs its jacket on barbed wire.” Each poem finds a way through the world haunted by its fault-line, the conflict of “I” and “you,” of speaker and the listener, variously earth, mind, lover. It is this confrontation of two images, the inner and outer worlds, that animates the sequence—all that the eye has “mistook,” yet is forced to say is “mine.” The fault-line lies beneath us throughout, yet we are compelled by these arresting poems to dare this poet’s barbed wire of ductile language and sharp music and grasp the jacket of meaning.

–David Sten Herrstrom, Poet and Author of numerous works; among them are Appearing by Daylight, The book of Unknowing, Light as Experience and Imagination and on the web a variety of hypertext poems.