Contains an excerpt of Dr. Fontaine's Golden Wheel Fortune Teller and Dream Book, published in 1862, as an appendix to this volume (pages 72 -144).
Summary:
"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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.