Sleep for Dessert

Through the looking glass, you'll find the witty and whimsical poems in Olivia Elektra Willson-Piper's Sleep for Dessert. Here, Alice wanders a gritty wonderland of concrete, pigeons, and streetside café tables, where the line between machine and animal blurs into the same clattering birdsong: "Chaffinch and chainsaw, / jackdaws and hammers, / common crane- / feathers on the façade." With carnivalesque imagery and clever wordplay, the poet weaves a compelling journey through a winding dreamscape. There is curiosity and love, melancholy and fear, the strange and the familiar; but most of all, there is the desire to leave home and the desire to find it again. These dreamlike poems are pinholes on a map where light leaks through.