Dream Dust

In the grand tradition of prose poems, Marcus Silcock's delightful Dream Dust is surreal, for sure, but in a way that complements rather than covers up the truth. Personal recollections and strong narrative undertones lie just below the bright, windy surface. These charming fictions take place all over the world but their subject is always what it looks like to be fully human, to be fully present, wherever you happen to be. Dream Dust makes a fine traveling companion.

- Matthew Rohrer

Marcus Silcock's newest collection, Dream Dust, is a masterful assemblage of prose poems. Are they autobiographical surrealisms or surrealist autobiographies? You decide. From Vegas to Seoul to Sitges to WrocÅaw, here we have a cosmic trip disguised as an international voyage. Prose poems with heart and dilated pupils. Tender yet absurd. Hallucinatory and strange, twirling through a fable, like taking psychedelics in the American desert and waking up in a Polish forest. Instead of a spaghetti western, this is a pierogi fever dream. This unique collection is full of forests and beer steins and cultural ceremonies and Eastern European architecture and magic broth. It's global, musical, and nostalgic every step of the way, like finding a tattered diary in a bowl of borscht. "You can count the tree rings on my forehead," Silcock promises us, later stating, "I am surrendering to this experience." We believe him and so we do the same. Through it all, Dream Dust is packed with sharp, punchy memories. Scraps of the past splashed in a foggy dew. If you try to find your way through these riveting narratives, know the compass is spinning and the map has caught fire. To open this book is to "roll the bone dice" and begin a new game. Give it a shot. See where you land.

- Ben Niespodziany

Dream Dust is an encyclopaedia of peculiarities and particularities. The title piece begins: 'This place is famous for shits and giggles.' These prose poems or micro-narratives are typically laconic; not infrequently metaphysical and/or philosophical. 'How uninteresting interesting things can become,' said Robert Walser', the German Swiss poet known as 'the poet of miniatures'.

Dream Dust is supple and ludic and deadpan and serious and invigorating and comic. In quasi-Swiftian mode we find ourselves stumbling upon 'Giant metal babies crawling with their metal bums in the air.' Seemingly, '[t]hose metallic bums were the future.' The book signs off with 'Hungry Ghosts'. The speaker follows 'the white monkey (BiaÅa MaÅpa) down the hole and into the beer garden.' A little later 'Someone smiles. Miles & miles of good smile.'

- Julian Stannard