The Sleep Hotel

Winner of the 2009 FIELD Poetry Prize

Amy Schroeder's The Sleep Hotel is a breathtaking debut. Elliptical, elegant, and gestural, these poems exhibit an intellectual acuity and a passionate discretion that consistently surprise and delight. Always lyrically inventive, Amy Schroeder has done nothing less than provide us with a new, ultra-contemporary poetic music for the meditations of the imagination and the heart.
--David St. John

As Virginia Woolf says about art, "It all depends at what depth you take the option." Amy Schroeder, poem after poem, takes it at a great and clear depth. There isn't a wasted breath in this book: everyone will find their favorite poems; I particularly admire "The Bone Room" and "How Wide. How Red. How Canopy." But every single poem here wakes us up with its odd, wise truth.
--Jean Valentine

Amy Newlove Schroeder's perfect title for her debut volume, The Sleep Hotel, is a guiding metaphor. These poems rise from the other side of the mirror, from the dream establishment we check into and out of each night. These poems rise from the startling, uninhibited speech below consciousness, then are boldly crafted, as dream logic lifts into wide-awake fire. These are passionate, radically beautiful poems, heartbreak hotel in somatic heaven: so inventive and freshly expressive they hand us, as if dropped from the famous extended hand of John Keats, the key to pure wonder.
--Carol Muske-Dukes