ScarletTanagerBooks

Praise for
Crimes of the Dreamer

She does what she wants: a rare contemporary muse-poet; and what a relief to our souls! crimes of the dreamer is a jewel that takes us to an experience only great poetry mediates: the feeling that everything personal points beyond itself, and everything numinous belongs to the depths of the human soul. —Alicia Torres, Venezuelan poet and writer
author of Fatal and Regarding the Rose

"La Vida es sueño, y los sueños sueños son" (Life is a dream and dreams are only dreams), wrote Calderón in the seventeeth century. For psychoanalytical-learning moderns, dreams have tended to replace religion as the vehicle of revelation. Naomi Lowinsky, poet and Jungian analyst, is aware of this fact on many levels. The anima she connects with in dreams represents not a lost aspect of the self but the lost (or repressed) potentiality that exists in every woman. The dance of her poems is a recovery of that deep anima-energy. Lowinsky's mythic orientation allows her to move easily among various realms: personal, religious, historical. "My story is different/than the one men tell" she insists in an earlier book. Here, the crime is the crime of birth and history, which the poet not only redeems, but re-dreams. Again and again the book transports us to what Lowinsky calls that primal place in which the god-image leaps out of the animal realm: "word for what is awakened—/and has been for a thousand generations—/code twisting back to old pelvic bones—"—Jack Foley, critic and poet, author of
O Powerful Western Star