Waking Dreams

The inspiration for Waking Dreams came from a question from the poet''s young son: "is my life a dream, and someday I''ll wake up and be in the real world?" To dream can mean to strive for a very real and reachable ideal, but dreaming also finds us at our most unknowing and vulnerable. From this starting point, these poems explore the nature of dreams amid the often surreal aspects of daily life, and the subtle interconnections between the two.

Donna Potts was born in Joplin, Missouri and now lives in Manhattan, Kansas, where she teaches at Kansas State University. She received a Fulbright Senior Lecturing Award to the National University of Ireland, Galway in 1997-98, and returned there in 2004-05. She has contributed to the Blackwell''s Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 (2006), and her critical study Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition is forthcoming. Although she has written extensively on the poetry of Howard Nemerov, Seamus Heaney, Moya Cannon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and others, Waking Dreams is her first book of poetry.

The inspiration for Waking Dreams came from a question from the poet''s young son: "is my life a dream, and someday I''ll wake up and be in the real world?" To dream can mean to strive for a very real and reachable ideal, but dreaming also finds us at our most unknowing and vulnerable. From this starting point, these poems explore the nature of dreams amid the often surreal aspects of daily life, and the subtle interconnections between the two.

Donna Potts was born in Joplin, Missouri and now lives in Manhattan, Kansas, where she teaches at Kansas State University. She received a Fulbright Senior Lecturing Award to the National University of Ireland, Galway in 1997-98, and returned there in 2004-05. She has contributed to the Blackwell''s Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 (2006), and her critical study Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition is forthcoming. Although she has written extensively on the poetry of Howard Nemerov, Seamus Heaney, Moya Cannon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and others, Waking Dreams is her first book of poetry.