Fontaine's Golden Wheel Fortune Teller and Dream Book

"The poems in Geoffrey Woolf’s new book—wise, sly, wry, and often outrageously funny—are based (rather loosely, I imagine) on Fontaines’s Golden Wheel Fortune Teller and Dream Book (1862). Before Dr. Freud explored dreams as the royal road to the unconscious, Dr. Fontaine explored dreams as the royal road to wealth, since the numerical equivalents of his dream images became the numbers one could bet in the lottery. As the good doctor himself explains, the poet 'proposed that he should compile some of the great achievements I have facilitated for my readers and reconstruct the dreams they must have dreamed in order for my work to deliver them to fortune.' The result, a dazzling range of forms from sonnets to prose poems, may not make you rich, but will certainly lead you to contemplate the incongruities, absurdities, and occult truths which constitute (to cite another work of Dr. Freud) the psychopathologies of everyday life"--publisher's website.

Year

2020

Language

English

Publisher

Dos Madres Press

Editions

1

Pages

170

ISBN

9781948017732

Data source: Wikidata