Dream State

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 CHANGES BOOK PRIZE JUDGED BY LOUISE GLÜCK & EILEEN MYLES 

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 of Kurdish culture. In a stunning act of cogenerative imagination, Levinson-LaBrosse’s poetic voice emerges alongside the voices of others with whom she has collaborated. Together with her poems, these translated memories, testimonies and stories form an interdependent environment bridging time and perception. 

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 at risk. And everywhere the poet turns, she learns that peace is never self-sustaining. True peace is an enduring act of courage, and one that must be lived everyday. 

As the 2003 Iraq invasion reached its twentieth anniversary (2023) and the Islamic State’s attempted genocide in Shingal reaches its tenth (2024), Dream State attempts to sit with other people’s experiences, rather than extract details to exploit them; amplifies the work around the poet, rather than supplant it; and trusts that listening to individual perspectives will lead to common understanding.

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a poet, translator, and assistant professor at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). She earned her PhD in Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter, specializing in nineteenth-century poetry, and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as an MEd from the University of Virginia. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, In Other Words, Plume, Epiphany, Sewanee Review, The Iowa Review, and Words Without Borders. Her book-length translation works include Kajal Ahmed's Handful of Salt (2016), Abdulla Pashew's Dictionary of Midnight (2019), Nali’s My Moon Is the Only Moon (2021) and Farhad Pirbal’s The Potato Eaters (2024). She was a 2022 NEA Fellow, the first ever working from the Kurdish. She serves as the Founding Director of Kashkul and was the Founding Director of the Slemani UNESCO City of Literature.