THE EXHAUST OF DREAMS ADULTERATED

LaForge’s poetry collection explores the gradual breakdown of her parents’ marriage alongside her own coming of age in smog-filled Southern California.

These poems revisit the remnants of a childhood marked by generational tension, cultural assimilation, and environmental decay. Through detailed vignettes, the speaker assembles a mosaic of memory in which dust and debris take on symbolic weight. In “Conversing,” “the exhaust of dreams / adulterated” becomes a metaphor for what is both inherited and spoiled, a line that gives the collection its title and conceptual spine. LaForge favors longer lines and dense stanzas, unspooling thoughts with the rhythm of an internal monologue. Her diction is both elevated and precise, blending narrative clarity with lyric intensity. The collection’s pacing is steady, often contemplative, allowing the emotional undercurrents to emerge gradually. The author resists tidy closure or redemptive arcs; instead, LaForge offers layered portraits of relatably flawed individuals (parents, siblings, ancestors) whose choices ripple across generations. The speaker does not seek to absolve or accuse, but to observe with honesty and insight: “Our mother’s smoking might explain why / my sister and I were so small—it’s been / studied, smoke and low birth weight, all / the corollaries—though smallness wasn’t / considered a defect back then, but something / natural, part of the environment.”  There is a poetic discipline to how LaForge controls image and tone. Her metaphors are never ornamental; they arise naturally from memory and setting. The smog, the burning hillsides, the peeling paint of a once-proud house—all serve to externalize internal rupture. In these verses, California is less a place of sunshine and reinvention than a haunted archive of personal and cultural contradictions. LaForge’s work operates in the tradition of confessional poetry, though her aim is not confession, but reckoning. By documenting the past without romanticizing it, she creates space for reflection that feels both intimate and far-reaching.

A quietly devastating meditation on family, inheritance, and the limits of reinvention.