The Strange Mistakes Of Fish Analysis

Being exposed to different kinds of poetry from childhood, I grew fond of it though now I prefer fictional prose to poetry. As a profoundly sensuous form of creative writing, poetry both challenges my mind and conquers my aesthetic sense with its subtle wording. But specifically because it is a thought provoking and demanding form of writing I do not read poetry often. Therefore, the variety of topics, styles and forms of poems collected in Alehouse Journal 2011 disoriented me completely. However, the poems were carefully selected and united under the common styles, topics, and forms. Dreams was one of such topics. The complex nature of dreams make them one of the most prolific topics in poems.
It is a part of human condition to yearn for something unknown even if it is dangerous. In The Strange Mistakes of Fish, Carol Ellis discusses inherently human desire of almost unattainable objects: Humans are “wishing for something to happen other than” the reality they are living in (17). Moreover, she implies that, as strictly subjective beings, humans cannot comprehend and predict the implications of achieving the desired objects. In most cases humans are mistaken in their expectations and need to be aware of the dangers of their dreams coming true. As for the fishes “the water dreamt of suddenly becomes air”, so for humans dreams can bear a
Amy Miller, in The Church of the Rowing Machine, demonstrates how human’s imagination enlarges one’s perception of a dream. As long as a dream guides a human being through the life, as long as this dream prevails and one believes that “[one’s] crewmates…are illusion and distance is illusion” that cannot stop him on his way, this human being will come close to catching or even will catch the dream (Miller 45). The reality of a dream does not truly matter since its driving force is the only thing that counts and leads a human being to the new