Sueños: The Nighttime Mind by Marisa Silva-Dunbar

Marisa Silva-Dunbar's work is always a pleasure to read and her collection "Sueños" is no different. I think this collection may be my favorite. Dreams are powerful and I loved the connections to reality and the supernatural and how they wove themselves together in this manuscript. I especially related to her poems Mend, Shadow Figure, and Hymn for Rio and Rio Vidal. My favorite lines came from the poem the dream world: "I see a pulse of color/like a rainbow of embroidery thread", and "If only river spirits were eternal". These rich, powerful poems touch on reality and transport them into something more ethereal and sometimes while beautiful; they touch on the pain and darkness of the shadows reality has cast upon us. 

- Linda M. Crate, author of the forthcoming "Fairytale Love", and many more.

Wherever consciousness goes when we sleep, Marisa Silva-Dunbar’s Sueños: The Nighttime Mind clutches the trailing ribbon of it and refuses to let go. Moving from an industrial neighborhood in a dusty American town to the old ship treehouse at Meow Wolf, traversing the Rio Grande, then skipping onto Japan and England, the poems in Sueños lift stunning language from the hazy contours of a somnambulist’s secret notebook. Never one to shy away from peering directly into darkness, Silva-Dunbar cradles nightmares with equal devotion and adroitness as she does dreamscapes. Readers are rewarded, too, with perfectly ripe and pleasantly absurd conversations with celebrities that feel like old friends reunited to hatch some plot or mend an enduring hurt—Sabrina Carpenter helping out in the garden and Paul McCartney writing a bespoke song for a sorrowful sleeper are among some of the many star-lit moments in this collection. Don’t sleep on Sueños. 

– A.E. Copenhaver, author of My Days of Dark Green Euphoria