Review of dormilona by Connie Mae Oliver

Leonora Simonovis
Aug 29, 2025
4 min read

In Venezuelan Spanish, the word “dormilona” can be interpreted in a couple of ways: a sleeping garment for women —a “nightgown”— or a woman who sleeps a lot. dormilona is also the title of Venezuelan poet Connie Mae Oliver’s recent collection, in which the reader is invited on a journey across geographical, generational, and cultural thresholds that straddle the boundaries between reality and the dreamworld, like these lines from the poem “Hypnagogic,” which refers to the state between wakefulness and sleep:

I’ve never known I’ve slept.

Back at the airport is the saddest dream the only dream I know

in the lil tiny room

in Concourse B

when MIA used to allow smoking.

Most of the poems in dormilona take place between Venezuela and Miami, emphasizing the consequences of migration and the distance between the country the speaker remembers while growing up, and the one that exists now, which she can’t really access not only because of the geographical distance, but also because of the pain that remembering brings. Interactions with family members are mediated by technology and this makes the distance feel even greater: “These messages/are transported/via the pipelines/of mad-mute circuitry.”

Each of the five sections of the book is preceded by short epigraphs from “Florentino y el Diablo,” a poem by Venezuelan Alberto Arvelo Torrealba that was later turned into a song. The poem is a spontaneous contrapuntal challenge between a man named Florentino and the Devil himself. The song was widely popularized because it represents resilience and the triumph of good over evil. Oliver’s inclusion of snippets from the poem/song allude to the hybrid spaces in which the speaker lives and writes, and where her two languages, English and Spanish co-create and syncretize on the page.

Oliver switches between Spanish and English, and includes whole poems in Spanish without translation, underlining the fact that there are things she can only say—or say better— in one language, rather than the other. Interestingly, several poems are based on the etymology of specific Venezuelan words. In “El que va a dormir en el suelo,” for example, the speaker explains the origin of “macundales,” which means a person’s belongings, equipment or gear:

Me cuentan:

Ingenieros de los Estados Unidos

les decían a los obreros en Zulia:

GET YOUR MAC & DALES

To start working the rigs

Get your gear

became

Agarra tus Macundales

The poem starts with the words “Me cuentan” or “I’ve been told,” giving weight and value to orally transmitted knowledge.This allows the poet to preserve a part of her identity and culture, but also, to engage with an audience, to show others what it means to live in the hyphenated space between two languages.

One of the most salient features of this collection is the way the poet incorporates different voices, most of them belonging to family members. Oliver includes dialogues, recipes, a letter from her abuela, references to home remedies, spiritual traditions and popular songs, like Juan Gabriel’s “Amor Eterno.” But despite the poems’ playfulness, grief lurks underneath them all: the grief of leaving her country, of not being able to see her loved ones and participate in family celebrations and rituals; and especially, the grief of her abuela Gladys’s illness and eventual death,

Mama sends videos on WhatsApp, Gladys is confined to a bed or a

wheelchair and one can’t distinguish her arm from the armrests.

In airports all over the country, I looked out the tall windows to see

the earth. We had no language to tell each other we were lonely.

dormilona is an archive of generational wisdom, and at the same time, a kind of ‘thin place,’ a concept from Celtic mythology that, according to Harvard theologian Peter Gomes, is a place (or places) “where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity” and where “the clearest communication between the temporal and eternal” can be established. While these places can be physical, Gomes affirms that “perhaps the ultimate of these thin places in the human condition are the experiences people are likely to have as they encounter suffering, joy, and mystery.”¹ And this is evident in Oliver’s work, and her capacity to clearly recall specific moments of her life and bridging the linguistic and cultural gaps through storytelling and intertextual play.

¹ Sarah Blanton. “Thin Places and the Transformative Presence of Beauty.” On Being. https://onbeing.org/blog/thin-places-and-the-transforming-presence-of-beauty/

Leonora Simonovis is a Venezuelan American writer, editor, and educator, and the author of Study of the Raft, winner of the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry and Honorable Mention at the 2022 International Latino Book Awards. Her work considers the intersections of myth, language, and story in connection to the land and to her experience as an exile. Leonora’s poems and essays have been featured in the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, About Place Journal, Amsterdam Review, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, and others. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from The Poetry Foundation, VONA, CalArts, the Vermont Studio Center, Esperimento Sul Respiro and Anaphora. Leonora lives in upstate New York.