First Amazon Customer Review of My Book

Dreaming in Color, February 13, 2008
by K. Becker

The poems in Jayne Pupek's haunting debut collection are technically polished, even as they confront rough material: a mother's deliberate killing of her children, a stillbirth, terminal illness. Pupek ranges comfortably from an imagined Eve in Kansas "shucking corn in high heels" to the effect of the discovery of Spalding Gray's body on someone whose own "body leans towards water." Imagery and association are surprising and sometimes startling--"Wounds open like the mouths of whores"--but always engaging. It is hard not to assume that Pupek's experience as a mental health professional has lent her compassion and skill in plumbing the depths of the psyche. Even when the speaker of a poem is "varnished in sickness," the poems themselves are robust. Gorgeous and evocative cover art by Megan Karlen complements the written work. "We dream colors/ while sleeping in the curl/ of an egg," Pupek writes. Unquiet dreams, maybe, but dreams that linger and demand attention.