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Mastering the Dream:

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Listen to the
February 19th
reading of
Mastering the Dream

Moe's Books
Event Archives
Click here to read the
winning entry of the 'Dream a
Reality' Contest
“Nothing less than essential, existential questions haunt the heart and mind of Kelly Lydick’s
ambitious first book: What is the real? How did I get here? Only when “The entire world looks
different and I will never be able to see the old world again” can the speaker of Mastering the
Dream maneuver through epistle, poetry, Jewish thought, late-night TV, Plath, tattoo parlors and
a fear of death to begin to answer herself. Reminding us that “Information is not knowledge,”
and questioning the boundaries between everything, between fiction and nonfiction, dream and
reality, past and future, science and metaphor, she sets a third term between each—poetry,
ecstatic vision, present, theology—in order to suggest some preliminary answers: there’s no
such thing as either/or: there’s only and & and & and. This exhilarating wisdom is demonstrated
so brilliantly by the book’s own structure that in the end, when she proclaims “i see for the first
time. everything is clear,” we not only believe her: we seem to say it too.”
                                                     - Brian Teare, author of The Room Where I Was Born
Kelly Lydick meditates on the value of single letters while probing deep into the meaning of
memory and those passages of light and shadow that weave consciousness.  The great themes
of life and death, of loss and acceptance, are bound here in the journey of a young woman with a
growing mastery of language and the magic it can create.

    - Neeli Cherkovski, PEN Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature