POETRY CHAPBOOK
Dreamescapes (Alien Buddha Press, 2025)
‘Dreamescapes’ navigates the volatile interplay between the poetry of imagination and the numbing churn of capitalist routine. Waves of dream images break into various characters’ minds before they break down like the surf, from Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Drowning Girl’ to a Walter Mitty-esque jaded travel agent, washing away gray reality but leaving murky sediment.
Dreams may drown or deliver. Here they do both, always vivid, sometimes violent, never still.
This poetry chapbook is the English-language debut of Jorge López Llorente, a bilingual writer from Madrid who studied English Literature at the University of Oxford. It includes blackout poetry, prose poems and a sequence of increasingly irregular sonnets, with an experimental combination of modern and traditional forms, in both narrative and lyrical verse, adding to Llorente’s poetry and fiction published in UK, US, Canadian, European and Latin American magazines and shortlisted for UK and Spanish prizes.
Preview of three poems from Dreamescapes on the Alien Buddha Press blog
Reading of a poem from Dreamescapes
Book review in The Madrid Review
Llorente shows off his skills in a non-pretentious, entertaining way [...] via a kind of centrifugal dream logic. [...] One to watch.
Book review in Emma Lee's blog
'Dreamescapes' has a seductive quality, drawing a reader into a liminal landscape between dreams and reality, showing how aspirations can be good things, but also a way of avoiding dealing with reality. Jorge López Llorente has created an imaginative, thought-provoking exploration in contemporary verse forms.
Book recommended in Chewers and LatinosUSA Magazine
Book featured in Philly Chapbook Review
Radio interview about Dreamescapes on RNE
