Sarah Arvio is the author of Visits from the Seventh (2002) and Sono: Cantos (2006), both from Alfred A. Knopf. She has won a number of awards and honors, including the Rome Prize and Guggenheim and Bogliasco fellowships. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has also taught poetry at Princeton; she now lives in Maryland, by the Chesapeake Bay. (Author photo by Rigel Garcia de la Cabada)

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In this remarkable and unique work, award-winning poet Sarah Arvio gives us a memoir about coming to terms with a life in crisis through the study of dreams.

As a young woman, threatened by disturbing visions, Arvio went into psychoanalysis to save herself. The result is a riveting sequence of dream poems, followed by “Notes.” The poems, in the form of irregular sonnets, describe her dreamworld: a realm of beauty and terror emblazoned with recurring colors and images—gold, blood red, robin’s-egg blue, snakes, swarms of razors, suitcases, playing cards, a catwalk. The Notes, also exquisitely readable, unfold the meaning of the dreams—as told to her analyst—and recount the enlightening and sometimes harrowing process of unlocking memories, starting with the diaries she burned to make herself forget. Arvio’s explorations lead her back to her younger self—and to a life-changing understanding that will fascinate readers.