'Poetry which sings with its silences.
'As its title suggests, Šime Knežević’s first book-length poetry collection gestures towards the elusive and often fragmented reality of dreams and recollections. The poems speak of distance, dislocation and longing, evoked by the poet's cultural ties to Croatia, the awkwardness of personal relations and the discomforts of language. They also convey the embarrassment and regret which spring from daily encounters, especially when the point of view is that of an adolescent, a lover, a rival, indeed a poet, endowed with a more than usual amount of self-consciousness. These concerns are echoed, and heightened, by the elliptical form of the poems and their surreal dislocations, which invite the play of implication, giving space and silence their own kind of eloquence. The effect is remarkable, both for the range of emotions expressed, which includes humour and joy alongside unease and uncertainty, and for the intensity of their expression.' (Publication summary)
'This is a book that tempts you to use words like sophisticated, adventurous, accomplished and so on. And you could add a whole lot of others: confident, appealing, challenging, etc. But of course, adjectives like that don’t really do much more than describe vague initial impressions: they don’t tell us much about what’s going on under the skin. It’s taken me quite a while to feel even vaguely confident about what’s going on under the skin (or bonnet) of both In Your Dreams and Šime Knežević’s earlier chapbook, The Hostage.' (Introduction)
'This is a book that tempts you to use words like sophisticated, adventurous, accomplished and so on. And you could add a whole lot of others: confident, appealing, challenging, etc. But of course, adjectives like that don’t really do much more than describe vague initial impressions: they don’t tell us much about what’s going on under the skin. It’s taken me quite a while to feel even vaguely confident about what’s going on under the skin (or bonnet) of both In Your Dreams and Šime Knežević’s earlier chapbook, The Hostage.' (Introduction)
