Sputnik Dreams is a collection of poetry, micro fiction, and prose-poems that explore the liminal spaces between dreams and waking nightmares, as viewed through the prism of the author’s life and culled from memories and fantasies spanning childhood, youth, and middle age.
A man on a business trip to a foreign city sees his elderly parents at a bus stop, and then, throughout the day, sees other family members: cousins, aunts, uncles, and relatives long dead, none of whom recognize him (“In the City of K”). A couple driving down a coastal highway are deluged by a giant landslide; they survive, wander into a wedding on the beach, but soon discover the ceremony turns sinister and foreboding (“This is Not a Ghost Story”). And in “News of Sputnik,” a boy and his older brother, after the world’s first satellite is launched into orbit, attempt their own space flight, a kite that turns magical: “The kite’s invisible, but the line holds firm. Nearer the Earth, above houses and treetops, other kites bob like acolytes genuflecting to their unseen god.”