Wake Up and Dream by Michael Rothenberg

Wake Up and Dream fluctuates between bipolarities: diurnal consciousness and REM sleep, the self-deprecatingly personal and the politically messianic. The poet confesses to being an “effete capitalist,” made happy by something so bourgeois as wisteria in his own backyard—only to snap suddenly out of it and proclaim that “Each word I speak to my life is an affirmation … Each step I take is a determination of justice … In the fierce shadow of the marketplace / We are on our way up!” But, inevitably, despair soon swings down: “… poets have surrendered / Our craft to the totalitarian regime.” The macrocosm crumbles in on the micro, and the poet becomes drunk and unmanageable. He waxes confessional:  “Wrapped in fog / No matter where I am / There is no connection … I can’t remember / what I used to know.…” But this book is an elemental wave, after all, surfed by the momentum of poetry itself. As “The eye continues its liquid journey /  across the chemical mind,” we are exhorted to “Wake up