Dream State

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 CHANGES BOOK PRIZE

The poems of Dream State arise from the poet’s experience living and working in Iraq, not as a soldier or journalist, but as a writer, translator, teacher, and preservationist. In a striking instance of co-generation, Levinson-LaBrosse’s poetic voice emerges alongside the voices of others with whom she has collaborated—whose reflections and stories she translates to converse with her own in an interdependent exchange. 

As the 2003 Iraq invasion reaches its twentieth anniversary (2023) and the Islamic State’s attempted genocide in Shingal reaches its tenth (2024), Dream State is an attempt to sit with other people’s experiences, rather than extract details to exploit; to amplify the work around her, rather than supplant it; and to trust that listening to individual perspectives will lead to understanding. 

As a book, Dream State resists categorization. And yet it is fundamentally accessible in its humanity. People come together in understanding, and break apart just as quickly. Fictions shatter and endure, while national imaginations always seem to be risk. And everywhere the poet turns, she learns that peace is never self-sustaining.

Before the most recent invasion of Iraq, scholars wondered, given Iraq’s ethnic and religious composition, how any sort of democratic union could be fairly formed or peacefully sustained. Now, Americans are asking the same question about a democracy that has had two more centuries of practice than Iraq’s.