Dream State

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a poet, translator, and assistant professor at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). She earned her PhD in Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter, specializing in nineteenth-century poetry, and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as an MEd from the University of Virginia. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, In Other Words, Plume, Epiphany, Sewanee Review, The Iowa Review, and Words Without Borders. Her book-length works include Kajal Ahmed's Handful of Salt (2016), Abdulla Pashew's Dictionary of Midnight (2019), Nali’s My Moon Is the Only Moon (2021) and Farhad Pirbal’s The Potato Eaters (2024). She was a 2022 NEA Fellow, the first ever working from the Kurdish. She serves as the Founding Director of Kashkul and was the Founding Director of the Slemani UNESCO City of Literature.

"Through fragmented lyrical narratives, Alana Levinson-LaBrosse braids voices from a land where history wounds and teaches, and she writes with an understanding that could only come from truly listening. A poignant meditation on loss and love, at a place where storytelling is an act of surviving, Dream State is a testament to the voices that refuse to be silenced.” —Katie Peterson, author of Fog and Smoke"Dream State holds a mirror before those of us who have lived the silences and the songs of Kurdish life. Levinson-LaBrosse stitches together fragments of our history, our grief, and our joy. From villages erased to libraries burned, from mothers who carry love in their hands to poets who speak for the land itself, this book captures what it means to endure and to create despite it all." —Ava Homa, author of Daughters of Smoke and Fire"The form of the volume overall, with Levinson-Labrosse’s poems in continued dialogue with the words of Kurdish interviewees, shows how she wishes to subvert expectations of both lyric poetry and expatriate writing. Her position as poet is always liminal, neither quite inside nor quite outside of Kurdish society, wishing to speak of Kurdish subjects but not to simply incorporate them into her experience as lyric poets often have done with their subjects, from Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads (1798) until now... She is genuinely interested in listening to our narratives and memories to write sensitive, lyrical poems for everyone to engage with." —Alan Ali Saeed, Sulaimani University, Iraq