Dream house (Dream city)

A dizzying, gripping journey through our world via appropriated and original text.

There is a lion in a cage
I tell you to poke the lion through the cage

Dream house (Dream city) is the tour-de-force book-length poem and debut from rising star Elijah Jackson. A mosaic of original and appropriated texts, Dream house (Dream city) is urgent, riotous, and provoking, bringing a new and vital register to the poetic discourse. In relentless couplets, along with an afterword and index that deepen and complicate the text, Jackson careens in scope and tone: "The entire restaurant is surveilled/equally This mold will eat you." Taking its title from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and rooted in a close reading of it, the book’s roving eye pinballs from the quotidian to the philosophical, generating endless images and juxtapositions—a new way to look at the world.