Dreaming of You: A Novel in Verse

“Do songs get trapped in your / head like a rat on sticky paper?” ask Las Chismosas, “the eyes and the ears, the ones who you know before you know you,” in Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva. With section titles taken from singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez’s “Como la Flor,” this “novel in verse” is a surreal and spooky tale divided into four acts that traces the resurrection of the Queen of Tejano music nearly 30 years after her murder in 1995. For the speaker, Melissa, Selena is “a star I can only see because it has died.” As she explains in “Will We Ever Stop Crying About the Dead Star”: 

We say we miss them but we don’t mean them.
We mean the autumn we discovered them,
when we had our headphones in and felt like we were
   a movie.

Hailed as the “Tejano Madonna,” Selena shifted, in death, into a saintlier version of that Madonna, and her image can now be found on prayer candles. Lozada-Oliva critiques this idealization, but the collection’s true strength lies in its lyrical, genre-defying interrogation of women’s safety. In “I Watch Selena’s Open-Casket Funeral” the speaker says, “I can see myself crying over a body but also being the / body.” 

There are aspects of metafiction that distract from the transformative plot, but the work sings most beautifully when we are closest to Melissa’s Selena, when the magic of the moment bends perception: “When she / laughed I heard it in my hands.” Describing Selena’s new skin, the speaker says, “Does it make sense / when I say busy? […] a billion tiny little bugs / making up the colors / on my screen,” which is echoed in these lines by Las Chismosas, about how parts of Melissa

                        feel
asleep and what if
she never feels them
again fully, just
that tingly,
rained-on feeling?

This hybrid collection highlights the limits of control over our own creations and asks us to consider whether we will ever learn how to lose.