Sylvia Legris Sleep Gate review and information about the book with poems by the Canadian author. Fitzcarraldo Editions will publish the book by written by Sylvia Legris, the poet from Canada, November 19, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.
Sylvia Legris Sleep Gate reviews and information
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- “As a poet, Legris is a master of the curving tangent, working her way around a central theme while simply inclining, dropping clippings, allowing the reader to follow, suspended, her careful meanderings, often grounded by a hard-working title or subtle allusion.” (Paul J. Pastor, Los Angeles Review of Books)
- “What a mistake it was to take a short break after reading page 88. To stay with Legris’ voice is to subject oneself to a willed hypnosis that one must snap out of to put the book down mid-read. Sleep Gate is the beneficiary of this voice, at once mercurially dense, nimble, sonically effortless and spectrally haunting. The paucity of verbs in this collection is a remarkable demonstration that the mind’s visual apparatus has its own action, flow, rhythm and pathos. I think this is what it means to be a visionary. Sleeping is one third of our lives; Sleep Gate, with its enchantingly frosty music, is an urgent message that we not waste that third.” (Oluwaseun Olayiwola, author of Strange Beach)
Sleep Gate
- Author: Sylvia Legris (Canada)
- Book type: poems
- Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- To be released: November 19, 2026
- Length: 80 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: £ 12.99
- Buying Options >
Blurb of the book with poems by Sylvia Legris
In Sleep Gate, Sylvia Legris descends into biological dreaming itself: the sleep beneath sleep, where ‘the dream under the dream / is the dream of plants’. Taking up Inger Christensen’s summons to ‘dream our way inward’, and H.D.’s insistence that the dream is ‘no poetic phantasy / but a biological reality’, these poems dissolve the waking world into the fabric of sleep, drawing the natural and the built alike into its slow respiration.
Animating a whole taxonomy of sleepers – a ruby-throated hummingbird whose dream is a nest ‘hinging on spider silk’, a honeybee with ‘perfect recall of citrus one thousand and fifty-seven flowers ago’, an earthworm fleeing ‘by slow peristaltic wave’ – Legris follows sleep through phylum and season. Sensuous, Latinate and strange, this extraordinary collection captures the disjunctive, jump-cutting logic of dreams, leaping from a time before ‘the clouds are inventoried’ to winter’s ‘gnashing bruxism’, and assembles the world, as one does on waking, through distortion and towards clarity.
Sylvia Legris is born in 1960 and origintes from Winnipeg, Canada. Her poetry collections include The Principle of Rapid Peering, Garden Physic, The Hideous Hidden, Pneumatic Antiphonal and Nerve Squall, for which she was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize. Originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, she lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
