Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Not a narrative. Not an essay. Not a shopping list. Not a song. Not a diary. Not an etiquette manual. Not a confession. Not a prayer. Not a secret letter sent through the silent Palace hallways before dawn. Making a daybook of oblivion, A PILLOW BOOK leads the reader on a darkly comic tour through the dim-lit valley of fitful sleep. The miscellaneous memoranda, minutiae, dreamscapes, and lists that comprise this book-length poem disclose a prismatic meditation on the price of privilege; the petty grievances of marriage, motherhood, art, and office politics; the indignities of age; and the putative properties of dreams, among other themes, set in the dead of winter in a Midwestern townhouse on the eve of the end of geohistory. Feather-light in its touch, quixotic in its turns, and resolutely deadpan in its delivery, A PILLOW BOOK offers a twenty-first-century response to a thousand-year-old Japanese genre which resists, while slyly absorbing, all attempts to define it.

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Suzanne Buffam is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently A PILLOW BOOK (Canarium Books, 2016), which was named one of the ten Best Poetry Books of 2016 by The New York Times. Her other books are The Irrationalist, a finalist for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Past Imperfect, winner of Canada's 2006 Gerald Lampert Award. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jeannette Heian Ballard Writers' Trust, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Born and raised in Canada, she lives in Chicago.