Sara Whym
BETRAYALS
On Dreamscapes
Combining fiction, poetry, & theater, this hybrid trilogy begins as Maia, a writer from the borderlands, finally committing to her life’s work, suddenly beholds the vision of Ondine, a child she had desired yet reluctantly aborted 23 years earlier.Though Maia tries at first to discern and dismiss what is behind this spectral presence, the girl takes on a will and traits of her own, some evoking her father (who never knew a thing about her), others her “younger” siblings, but mostly recalling Lise, Maia’s mother, captured as a 5-year old in a 1920s photo.
Long guarded in the darkness by Hetna, Maia’s maternal grandmother, Ondine emerges to act as her wayward mother’s ethereal helper, spurring her on to weave a protective veil of stories, under which the two can meet: tales spun from the threads of everyday life — dreams, memories, and sensations that pass through her nights and days. Inverting the diversionary tactics of Scheherazade, Maia thus finds the courage to return to her writing desk each morning, delivering, in episodic reprisals, words that expose & disperse unfathomable truths belonging to their marvelous, yet strange and deeply troubled family; tales resurrected for Ondine so that she too might redeem some form of life.
Praise
for
Dreamscapes
“Sara Whym’s enigmatic poems open onto a shifting, oneiric world in which characters drift in and out and fade away and reappear, leaving in their wake hazy and shimmering traces like the hide-and-seek of dreams. The stories they tell——in fragments, allusions, feints, anamneses——are both heartbreakingly personal and a screen onto which our own stories unfold. Dreamscapes asks a lot of its reader and gives a lot in return.”
——Mark Polizzotti, author of Why Surrealism Matters & Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton
“I love these poems… they have an interesting flavor of non-assholic T.S. Eliot to them.”
——Elisabeth Ladenson, author of Proust's Lesbianism & Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita
“These poems are like little theaters, each oneiric landscape staging a scene that is always unstable, flexible, elastic and metamorphic——like dreams themselves do; but staging it further, and better, than they do, thanks to the infinitely graceful effect of powerful writing.”
——Hélène Merlin-Kajman, author of Rachel & Lire dans la geule du loup
EXCERPTS from Volume I Betrayals (101 & 202 nights)
dreamscapes I–betrayals
(6 nights)
Romanic Review, 2017just like that i begin. i call — knowing what is, absolutely. asking you to draw me: a practice, a discipline, a resolution. hands and feet crawling through an opening [...]
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dreamscapes I–betrayals
(7 nights)
Hyperion: The future of aesthetics, 2021the emptiness you feel is an illusion. i’m walking down the street with christian. and i’ve been told to tell him that my first book of poems will be published very soon. [...]
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About Sara Whym
Sara Whym is a writer. She comes from the desert, has traveled far, and survived some harsh wind.
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