I have never read a collection like Jennifer Overfield’s That Same Dream (Glacial Speed Press 2025). The poems, as beautiful and melancholic as they are, comprise only one aspect of a threefold project. They become deeper and more complex when experienced alongside the woodblock print of the cover, designed by Lucinda Cobley, and the musical accompaniment composed by Bruce Chao. To fully experience the poetry of Jennifer Overfield, a reading of the project, alongside the dynamic sound collage can be found on YouTube, released by DistroKid. However, the written elements of That Same Dream, despite their foundational role in the TSD Collective project, still hold their own quiet mystery.
Reading the text brought to mind many images, which is no doubt a result of Overfield’s own use of metaphor and imagery, alongside the overall evocative nature of her poetry. This montage of pictures compounds an overall sense of comfortable isolation, like a weekend spent hiding from the world with a lover. The collection lacks complex descriptors, as it relies on the reader’s associations with each illustrated fragment. The third poem in particular,: ‘A dream. / A piece of glass. A dream that blew / my dress.’ allows proximity to the dream. A piece of glass and a dress blur together to create an amorphous and unique reading experience for the reader. One that could be interpreted as comfort, nostalgia, melancholia and beyond. As I read, I found myself reacquainted with an old sense of both loneliness and serenity.
In a way reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage, which combines and juxtaposes shots to produce narrative meaning, impressions, or associations of ideas for the viewer, Overfield’s poetry similarly juxtaposes images to generate meaning for the reader. Each image imprints something on the next, and as the collection circles back around to the beginning again, they all gain in depth. And I do mean this literally—That Same Dream is a wonder of traditional handset type methods, a limited edition: pure white Japanese Kozo and Pulp paper running in one slip and folded for each page. Each hand-bound copy offers a platform for Overfield’s poems, each one soft and almost skeletal—the lines resemble black ink ribs against the fine paper. It is a collection of marked contrast. Each image striking and indicative of the next, each letter a rebellion against the paper it resides upon, each moment of unfolding pages subverts the way we are taught to read.
With mentions of God throughout the collection, Overfield stirs a sensation of divine listlessness onto the page. ‘God is a grown man’, ‘the ocean was a word God kept / repeating’, ‘getting God to forgive me’; the ‘God’ of Overfield’s text is always capitalised, always male. Familiar, in the way that divinity seems to brush against our lives, whether or not it is invited. Yet this God is strange, an aspect of Overfield’s prose that stood out to me compared to the rest. This is not because he exerts influence over the narrator or holds visible authority over the poems, but because his divine presence seems to lack intention or intellect—because he seems lost.
The recording, a melodious, almost insidious experience of the poem, is available on YouTube. At a thirteen-minute runtime, the reading adds a far greater depth to the poems than a reader might understand on their first listen. Compiled audio of a dog barking, fire crackling, radio static and many other distorted sounds accompany the poetry readings. Monotonous and eerie, at times almost extraterrestrial, the reading bleeds through into the divine implications of the collection. Although every image is undoubtedly human and familiar, often simple in its description, they hide a myriad of disguised sensations. For instance, in the tenth poem:
…is either light coming through the open door
or you
in the bathroom in an open shirt.
These scattered phrases share the intimacy of the narrator with ‘you’. They show the vulnerability of the addressee, with the images creating a montage evocative of ‘light coming through the open door’. A luminescent collation of hope, comfort, openness, and reassurance.
Amidst themes of growth, companionship, dreams and divinity, Overfield’s narrator takes up an introspective murmur, such a soft quiet that I felt I should make my breathing quiet, for fear of disturbing each tender thought as I read. The poet demonstrates a deep understanding of descriptive restraint and lexical precision. And with so few words, That Same Dream depicts so much.
To learn more about the TSD Collective and hear about the project in the words of the creators themselves, visit their website.
Rachel Bulman (she/her) holds a BA in English and Creative Writing as well as an MA in Publishing from the University of Exeter, specialising in interactive and children’s fiction. Her written work has appeared in The Book of Choices, Velvet Fields, and Exeposé, among others. Find her on Instagram @worm.can.read, through her online portfolio, or ask the bridge troll who taught him his riddles three.
