Sarah Arvio's third poetry collection, Night Thoughts, is a memoir in three parts, an unusual way for an always original and surprising writer to confront her past. She calls it an "exploration of the dreaming mind," set out in 70 irregular sonnets, "dream poems" that describe "the evolution of a psychoanalysis and the events that gave rise to that treatment."
When Arvio was 12, she had disturbing dreams and visions based on personal experiences. The poems read like a patient talking in a rambling, associative way to her doctor about her dreams:
the taxi leaves me standing in the street
& the streetlamp goes out there is this sort
of dream that leaves me without a heart or
more like a hole in my selfheart
heartself that hellhole of a dream
The poems are mesmerizing, brutal, sexual, allusive, filled with colors and wild images. These are followed by the book's second part, a set of notes to the poems, meant to be read as a narrative; parts of the poems are explicated by Arvio while her story is recreated out of her experiences and dreams--Arvio as analyst tries to come to grips with her "self." Lastly, an extensive index allows us to "relocate" some of the images, colors, and dream-related thoughts that appear throughout the book. Night Thoughts is challenging and utterly fascinating. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher