These Are Not My Dreams And Anyway Nothing Here Is Purple

A monster made of grass, a disgusting wedding present, a Baby Parade. A series of capricious and lazily malevolent authority figures, wielding power with impunity, excused and indulged by teams of complicit functionaries. Awful children behaving abominably; awful adults trapped in physical and emotional cages partly of their own making.

In These Are Not My Dreams..., the rules of the ordinary world are twisted and undermined, as Michael Conley's writing explores how readily we welcome the cruel and absurd into our everyday lives. Picking up some of the same themes and characters from his acclaimed 2019 prose collection Flare and Falter, these poems hum with an oddball energy that urges the reader to take the ridiculous seriously.