I’m in An Bình, an island across the Mekong River from Vĩnh Long, a mid-sized city in Vĩnh Long province, Vietnam. I am out of place, out of routine, seeing things vividly. So, this is perhaps a good place to reflect on pleasure in writing, the pleasure of its activity through me. Or how it feels to be an instrument of that activity.

Dreamland Court presents a complex range of human experience and desire through vernacular soundings. In a way, this book is more like an epic poem than a novel, derived from the monologues of men and women searching for the meaning to the actions of their lives, making sense, or not, of experience at the often-overlooked extremes of the so-called American Dream.

Dale Martin Smith lives in Toronto, Ontario, and teaches at Ryerson University. With Robert J. Bertholf, he edited An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson (2017), available in a new paperback edition from the University of New Mexico Press.

Dale Smith has published essays, reviews, and criticism, including Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (University of Alabama, 2012), and is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform, 2014). He is also the co-editor with Robert Bertholf of An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan's Lectures on Charles Olson (due fall 2017).

Dale Smith is the author of the recently published book of poetry, Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform, 2014); and a book of scholarship, Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (Alabama, 2012). He is on the faculty of the department of English at Ryerson University, Toronto.