Dream of Me as Water

From the publisher:
Moving beyond the themes of race, identity, and personhood navigated in Mythical Man, David Ly’s second book of poetry, Dream of Me as Water, explores ways of being that are not beholden to the expectations of others. Using water as his central metaphor, Ly meditates on how identity is never a stagnant concept, but instead something that is intangible, fluid, and ever-evolving. Dream of Me as Water revels in the nuances of the self, flouting outside perceptions for deeper, more personal realities.

FINALIST 2023 ReLit Award

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praise for dream of me as water

In Dream of Me as Water, David Ly guides us through the depths and idiosyncrasies of the surreal, love, and creatures both real and imagined. These poems present the surface and invite the reader to break through that surface, offering swirls of lived emotion and fantastic imaginings. Dream of Me as Water is a wild and rewarding poetic ride, written with David’s generosity, care, and irresistible sly sense of humour.

—Jen Sookfong Lee, author of The Shadow List

These bioluminescent poems embrace the beauty and terror of swimming in the dark pools of our subconscious fears and desires. David Ly asks how to love in a world where what we’ve inherited has failed utterly and with the knowledge that what we create may cause harm. And yet, the poet locates the heartbeat of connection—it murmurs in dreams, underwater and Googled lyrics. Dream of Me as Water blooms in resplendent colours while issuing “a warning / to the stars / that they will / need to come / down to the dark.

—Adèle Barclay, author of Renaissance Normcore

The central metaphor in David Ly’s poetry collection is water. In Vietnamese, the word for water—nước—is the same as the word for “country, nation, homeland.” In tight and accessible poems, Ly takes on the slippery notion of belonging, showing us what it takes to stay afloat and to dream. These are love poems to the self, touching on race, queerness, and identity without ever letting them overwhelm the poet’s crystal-clear voice.

—Hamilton Review of Books

_{Dream of Me as Water is ultimately a touching read because of how down-to-earth it is. The collection does not pretend to know things it does not know, and takes the reader on a journey to find things out together. As we weave in and out of dreams and travel through the past and present, we uncover truths and even more questions, but we are comforted by Ly’s poetic reassurance that we are all just people, trying to figure it out.}
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diacritics, diasporoic vietnamese artists network

_{The poems in Ly’s classification-defying second collection propose that suspension is just another place of possibilities, whether to continue in the same direction or to begin anew, rather than to resign oneself in defeat. It is in this state of letting go that that freefall-induced clarity, rather than answers, begins to emerge.}
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heavy feather review

_{Dream of Me as Water is a commitment to presence and togetherness, it holds the promise of laughter. It’s a collection written with the seriousness and the lightness of dreams, the anticipation of the moment when we can finally awaken and recount them to those who have been waiting for us to join them.}
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periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics