YOU CAN FIND out the main public facts about Mathias Svalina's Dream Delivery Service here--http://www.dreamdeliveryservice.com--and while you are there, you should go ahead and subscribe, because it is definitely worth it.
A subscription provides you with a month of dreams written by Svalina, delivered by him to your very door if you live in the city he happens to be residing in that month, or by the U.S. Postal Service if you live elsewhere. (I have subscribed twice, both times receiving my dreams by mail.)
The dreams are prose poems in a quite small font (9 point, I guess?) on a small (five-and-a-half inches by four-and-a-quarter inches) sheet of white paper, and I would place them among the best work Svalina has done (and I am a long-time admirer). They occasionally remind me of James Tate by their ability to sweep you off in a surprising new direction before you even notice it. More remarkable, though, is Svalina's sheer power of invention: the extraordinary variety of scenarios, landscapes, characters, and events compassed in the dreams.
And most remarkable, I would say, is that in a literary landscape where the "dreamlike" has become a tired old mill horse ceaselessly wearing a path around the same old tropes, Svalina's poems really do evoke the oneiric--better than anything I have read since Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, certainly.
Svalina's dreams accept the most fantastical premises--e.g. that you are being chased by a giant in a supermarket, the center of which is a volcano--with a deadpan matter-of-factness that extraordinarily mimics the tone of my own dreams, and like my dreams Svalina's are not exactly light, not exactly dark, but oddly serene with a gentle but chilly undercurrent of disquiet. His dreams are uncannily like my dreams, save that they do not vanish like smoke while I am trudging to the bathroom to brush my teeth in the morning. No. They may be read slowly, savored, and re-read, as often as I like. Bless the Dream Delivery service.
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