Reviews of As for Dream

“In Saskia Hamilton’s As for Dream, spare, miraculously explosive lyrics track a struggle with erotic longing and renunciation and an equally transfixing immersion in family memories….A sequence of supremely evocative poems.” —Bookforum

“From their stronghold at the changeable borders between inner and outer reality, Hamilton’s poems thrust and parry, teasing the shadows of mood and circumstance closer, then holding them at bay.” —Poetry

“As for Dream has everything one looks for in a slender volume of poems—reverie, longing, ‘the tick of small insects against the lamp-light.’” —Crossroads

“A luminous exploration of the ambit where dream, memory, imagination, and longing pass into and through one another.” —Kirkus Reviews

“[Hamilton’s] poems are, quite simply, delicate morsels to be placed carefully between the lips.” —The Hollins Critic

“‘Nothing ever came again to warn her,’ Saskia Hamilton writes, and nothing comes to warn the reader of the adamantine turmoil, the ardent and articulate perceptions in these original poems of love in extremis. We are taken, figuratively and literally, by storm.” —Forrest Gander

“Saskia Hamilton is not a quiet poet, just an extremely subtle and fierce one. There is a quality of spiritual stubbornness and astonishing resilience that courses through even her briefest utterances as, with grace and technical ease, she breaches the chasms that appear to divide ‘experimental’ poetics, classical fragments, Romantic aphoristic debris, and Oriental glimpsing of the ineffable.” —Jorie Graham