Dreams of the Floating House by Karen Sandberg

Dreams of the Floating House is a waltz in summer time, holding the breath of the world. It invites one to join the poet’s life-journey of search, becoming, and overcoming. “Days float past like clouds,” days (and poems) of water, wind, darkness, loss, trees, and butterflies. The sun always comes out.

–Karen Herseth Wee, author of The Book of Hearts – Finalist, Mn Book Awards 1994 “Portent” Poet Artist Collaboration, 20th Annual, Red Wing, Mn. 2021 chapbook

Very occasionally one perceives in a book of poems the clear outline of a life lived with integrity and feeling. Karen Sandberg‘s Dreams of the Floating House is that kind of book. A sense of time passing richly informs Sandberg’s spare, elegant poems: “We have time. We have no time. Time is all we have.” Her generous poems of generational succession are especially lovely. Readers will want to return often to the intimate space Sandberg shares with us in her poem-house that seems to float on the dream of life itself.

–Thomas R. Smith, author of Medicine Year and Storm Island

Praise to Karen Sandberg for the expansiveness of her debut collection, Dreams of the Floating House. Grouped in five sections, the poems are grounded in her childhood in a hand-built house on Lake Superior. Other sections open out through adult nightmares of memory and loss of my home shelter/my ark. Hope takes her through the despair of an abusive marriage in No One Needs to Know, a list poem revealing how fear drove me to strength. Poems that celebrate the flowering of new love carry, too, the shadow of loss and death. In the final section, Sandberg, grown-up nurse and independent mother to two sons, assembles a bouquet of poems celebrating freedom, the return of trust and her ability to love. It is her poetic prowess that guides the reader through these shifting life events and changing emotional states.
–Mary Moore Easter, The Way She Wants to Get There: telling on myself