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Šime Knežević: a note on In Your Dreams

Šime Knežević reflects on In Your Dreams (Giramondo 2025). His first book-length poetry collection, the work gestures towards the elusive and often fragmented reality of dreams and recollections.


I have to admit that I am still coming to terms with In Your Dreams as a book-object and not as an unwieldy folder of TextEdit files. The journey to write the collection has spanned roughly eight years. It’s tempting to connect the poems with a kind of autobiographical narrative of their composition, like looking through a photo album – I was in this country when I wrote X, I was recovering from this emotional weather when I wrote Y, I wrote Z before the pandemic, etc.

Reading the poems again, I am surprised with how my preoccupations as a writer have endured and deepened over time, how they’ve suggested contiguities and connections. Be it memory and identity. Autobiography and make-believe. Self and Other in their various inflections, crises, under the influence of desire or iPhones or whatever else. Sometimes I have tried to capture a vexed sense of remoteness and separation, the world of adult unease and the distances we harbour, caught between reality and dream and fantasy, labour and play, longing and loss. 

What I look for in a poem is a sense of change, a startling gesture, a small mercy, a consolation, something negotiable. I think this is reflected too in the range of formal approaches with riffs, vignettes, suggestions, stock-taking and direct address. I want a poem to be more than a remnant or souvenir of an experience, but itself be an experience for the reader.

Photo: Tim Bauer

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