I Was There for Your Somniloquy

Hypnagogia is the transitional stage between sleep and wakefulness—an intermediary moment of physiological limbo where hallucinations and out-of-body experiences commonly occur. Kelli Anne Noftle’s poems reside in this space of “threshold consciousness” where a voice speaks to and from the other, hovering inside a liminal world of strange admissions and abstract silences. Her book, I Was There for Your Somniloquy, was selected by Rae Armantrout for the 2010 Omnidawn Poetry Prize and is due for publication in early 2012. Armantrout describes the collection as a “destabilizing meditation on our divided selves: our split brains and checkered evolutionary pasts.” A somniloquy, a speech one makes in one’s sleep, weaves itself through the language, continually disorienting the reader and subverting subject matter, insisting there is a very precarious boundary between the conscious and unconscious, logical and illogical, dream and waking life. Other poems in this book dip below an oceanic unconscious, describing mating habits, taxonomy, and defense mechanisms of deep sea Nudibranchs (sea slugs). Noftle suggests not merely the analogousness between this species and ourselves, but creates an emotional expansiveness, exploring mysteries within and beyond the self.