Sleepers' Republic by David Gruber
In David Gruber’s Sleepers’ Republic nature is dreaming, and we are its dreams. Time is slowed down or speeded up: “suddenly, the sun / gives way to stars.” And: “What we knew moves sudden / without warning / throwing us to the ground / an emptiness in the sea / The air above us filled with fruit.” It may be that love “offers the opposite of a kiss,” yet Gruber’s upended universe is nonetheless an exhilarating medium in which the reader can both swim and breathe.
— John Ashbery author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Notes from the Air
These poems capture the melancholy at the end of the show, when the world has finally been emptied of objects and holds only human language and silence. And then the show starts up again, repopulated object by object, shadow by shadow, word by word, just as a child collects the world into being, and the republic begins anew.
— Eleni Sikelianos author of The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls
With staccato rhythms, David Gruber’s Sleepers’ Republic has recreated a world of the nightly universe, of latent emotions and evicted longing. Gruber asks us to not forget a world where, as he writes, we can still whisper “secrets to each other/ that we were surprised/ to discover we kept.” And to enter that dark world despite the fact that we might find ourselves eventually in the “high blue” morning that comes after it where the same secrets of our dreaming become “garish and livid.” But we must enter it regardless. To see the “wet art of boundaries,” “the earth/ a sapphire under sky,” we have to.
—Dorothea Lasky author of Awe
Author Biography
David Gruber is a graduate of Bard College, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Denver. He holds a PhD in English,and has taught at the United States Military Academy and Bard College.
