The Exhaust of Dreams Adulterated by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

The Exhaust of Dreams Adulterated published 2025 by Broadstone Books

I did something with this book – The Exhaust of Dreams Adulterated by Jane Rosenberg LaForge – that I very rarely do with poetry collections, and read the whole thing through in a single sitting. I say “sitting”, I was actually standing on a packed commuter-hour train from London to Brighton (where I was travelling to perform at a mixed-bill comedy night).

Usually, I wouldn’t associate uprightedness, an inability to move and the exhaled breath (and conversation) of depressed, cigarette-soaked commuters and Home Counties tourists an ideal backdrop for literature, however there is an immediacy, a humanity and a (thankful) clarity to the writing in this book that allowed me to fall forwards into the page (metaphorically only) and held me there, tight.

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The Exhaust of Dreams Adulterated contains autobiographical pieces or, perhaps, pieces riven close to autobiography, detailing a childhood spent in Southern California (or maybe Northern California, I don’t know much about California, though it is one of only three American states I’ve ever (knowingly) entered¹) as the second generation of German Jewish immigrants from Europe who moved due to the rising anti-Semitism of the first half of the 20th century.

So there is, yes, generational trauma here, but there is also a sense of difference and confusion arising from being a child of Europeans in a place that has been building its own independent cultures for, by that point, a very long time.

The traditions of both German and Jewish heritage mark the family’s differences, yet these are also things they choose to almost try to exploit, especially in the narrator’s entrepreneurially inspired (if not gifted) father, who spends many Falls (Autumns) and Winters of the narrator’s childhood buying small pine trees from the Northern forests of the Pacific coast (all the way up to and beyond Vancouver, somewhere else I haven’t been) in order to sell them as Christmas decorations in assorted Californian parking lots (car parks)…

There’s discussion, lots, of familial breakdown and the nuances of adult relationships – the poet Jane Rosenberg LaForge approaches depictions of parental relationships not from the perspective of the child she was at the time, but as an adult writing with hindsight and nuanced understanding…

The collection looks into the ways in which some people want to get things from a marriage that are often impossible or impractical to obtain…

There’s lots about the complexities of status and money and class and the intersections of ambition as an immigrant trying desperately to integrate into mid-century small town (or small town energy) America, and how this intersects with family obligations and marital collapse…

We see how money erodes care, how blunt financial ambition poisons homes, and this is all depicted clearly, calmly, with nuance and lyrical beauty…

This is a collection of works that each focus on the idea, on the narrative or the image being explored, and this precision, and comfort with using poetry as a narrative vehicle² that – for me – really makes the collection land.

There are pictures and ideas here, experience and nuance and humanity.

Below are some of the lines and images I highlighted during my first read through of the text (while standing on that packed Thameslink train):

deer in our ivy, / but never in our garbage (p. 3)

We ran from / Flowers because they attracted bees (p. 31)

a marriage of skin / conditions, heartbreak and / rashes (p. 36)

a volcano erupted / in the Philippines, seeding the atmosphere / with an island’s primordial contents […] the blue turn of embers on the verge of ignition; rinds / of citrus streaking the sky […] high and dissonant elements of chance […] the colors [sic] were like horses pulling the sun across / the mind’s eye (p. 58)

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I’ve dipped back into the collection since, reading a piece here and there in the following days since I burst through it, and there’s so much here to love…

Lots about gardens and the borders of domesticity, where neighbourhood and thus “outside” meets the idea of home…

Lots, too, about where hope and opportunity merge and flounder, where the realities of self and self-image clash…

there is interesting material about generational change and the ways in which people integrate and/or de-integrate amongst the societies and communities they live within…

This is living poetry, bluntly… full of memory and imagining, perhaps reimagining… looking at youth and childhood with the knowledge and wisdom of adulthood… with the clear poetic language of the mature and artful writer…

Lots to enjoy here, and very little, indeed, to dislike…

Worth more attention than I’ve given it here, for sure.

A compelling, engaging, serious, collection and well worth your time.

Order The Exhaust of Dreams Adulterated from Broadstone Books.

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1. Despite having spent almost four years of my life in Toronto, Ontario (Canada) (cumulatively), the vast majority of that happened while borders to the US were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and, well, now hardly seems the time for a poet-cum-comedian-cum-blogger with a history of poor mental health who identifies (mostly quietly) as non-binary and an anarchist to visit again…
   I’ve spent a half-day in Detroit, had (unless I’m forgetting one) three long weekends in New York City (twice during my years as a Torontonian, once waaaay back in 2011), an hour or two on the American side of Niagara Falls, once, and spent just over a week in San Francisco when I was 18. And that’s my relationship with the continental United States! Maybe for life! ↩︎
2. That’s not me saying that poets who don’t incorporate narrative into their poems are less brave or more likely to be floundering as a writer, but – for me – a collection of writing where one is witness to more images than ideas (or experience) is exhausting, and not in a pleasant way.  ↩︎