Book Review: And Still I Had These Dreams by Ann Christine Tabaka – A Soft-Spoken Wrecking Ball of Memory and Regret

Ann Christine Tabaka’s And Still I Had These Dreams (Clarenden House Publications) lands less like a collection of poems and more like a quiet detonation. What at first feels muted and nostalgic quickly reveals itself to be a record of slow devastation, grief, loss, time, and human fragility dancing awkwardly together in a collapsing hall of mirrors. The emotional architecture of this modern poetry collection is deceptively intricate, the cracked beams and peeling wallpaper of Tabaka’s lines sheltering something raw, persistent, and deeply uneasy at the core of contemporary poetry.

The collection’s relentless meditation on memory is best exemplified in Yard Kitsch, where a seemingly kitsch object, a fading plastic bird, becomes a linchpin for a life’s worth of loss: “it was a treasure, / bringing back gleeful years / when she puttered in the garden.” The specificity of the bird, gaudy and ridiculous, is no accident; it stands as an unglamorous but deeply human monument to grief. Tabaka shows her hand here: she is not interested in grand gestures. Her project is forensic, peeling back the skin of sentimentality to expose the trembling muscle underneath. The deliberate flatness of “it tiptoes into a pale existence, / he follows …” is devastating not because it tries to be, but because it refuses to try. This restraint is where her power lies.

Tabaka’s most searing work explores internal collapse, with Entrenched emerging as a kind of manifesto of defeat. “I have become too much of what I am,” she confesses, echoing the self-consuming spiral that haunts the whole anthology. The poem is built on bitter recursion, the lines circling back on themselves like a noose. When she writes, “The centre has pulled away from its core, / it dangles frayed with disillusion,” the imagery is surgical, cold, and horrifying in its precision. Here, Tabaka doesn’t romanticise mental struggle; she sketches it out with the unflinching hand of someone who has worn its weight daily. The risk with such repetition is always tedium, but she sidesteps it by drilling deeper each time, layering despair until the reader feels complicit.

While individual portraits of loss and identity dominate the foreground, a quiet rage against ecological and societal decay seeps through the collection’s bones. In Straws, and Bottles, and Bags, Oh My!, Tabaka weaponises simplicity: “We wade knee deep / in the waste of / our own creation.” The poem could easily tip into the preachy or sanctimonious, but she saves it by maintaining her characteristic emotional distance. There’s a deliberate numbness here, a resignation that fits seamlessly with the broader themes of abandonment and rot. This isn’t activist poetry in the traditional sense; it’s an exhausted, necessary documentation of a slow collective suicide, and it hits all the harder for its lack of rhetorical flourishes.

Tabaka’s closing piece, And Still I Had These Dreams, turns the entire collection inward, burning the dreamscape to ash. “Dreams of grandeur, iced in white frosting. / Waking to the truth.” The imagery here is almost sickly sweet, setting up a brutal fall into disillusionment. The final note is not one of hope or catharsis but of grim acceptance, a thematic twin to the anti-romantic fatalism running through much contemporary poetry from independent publishing scenes. Compared to the polished optimism peddled by mainstream outlets, Tabaka’s work sits proudly in the dirt. She is in conversation with writers like Louise Glück and the sharper moments of Ocean Vuong, poets who understand that confronting ruin is more honest, and often more beautiful, than pretending to heal it.

In the ecosystem of modern poetry collections, And Still I Had These Dreams stands as a soft-spoken wrecking ball. It is a book for wide readers of contemporary poetry who are tired of art that flatters itself. Tabaka delivers a literary analysis of loss with such slow violence that you barely notice the wounds until you’re bleeding. This is poetry stripped of artifice, a bruised but unbowed testament to the stubbornness of dreamsan, d the mess they leave behind.

About the Author

Ann Christine Tabaka was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize in Poetry; nominated for the 2023 Dwarf Stars award of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association; winner of Spillwords Press 2020 Publication of the Year. Her bio is featured in the “Who’s Who of Emerging Writers” 2020 and 2021.