Sleepers' Republic

In Sleepers’ Republic, we are asked to question love, to question politics, to question why we engage with these subjects the way we do. In poems that sometimes feel like songs from dreams long forgotten, David Gruber guides us through a world that is often upended by disappointment and we, lost in these musical poems, find beauty in that which we cannot control.

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 Quick Question