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“It was the year us girls had a feminine desire to go missing,” Vanessa Roveto, acclaimed author of bodys, begins her book within the remnants of a car crash, fragmenting identity, grief, and heart.
Beginning with the death of daddy, the “I” soon meshes with whatever and whomever she comes into contact with—strangers, actors, a Covid crush. She absorbs these people and objects, dispersing them into the Southern California landscape, the Uncanny Valley, warping time and naturalizing dreams.
Documenting a period of both global and personal loss, Roveto crafts a book-length poem that weighs heavier than the Ego in L.A. Splintering Self between Other and palm trees in the summer heat, Mulholland Dive spins a Lynchian setting within a feminine eruption of alluring language, fluked romance, and the aftershocks of grief.
"I read this hypnotic poetry book in one sitting. At first, it hurt my feelings because I thought the narcissistic love interest was me. Then I realized it’s poetry and abstract and the character was many people and things. Or maybe it was all me and none of it was me, and either way it didn’t matter because the best books should hurt the writer’s lover’s feelings. So I wiped my tears and finished the book and realized it was absolutely perfect in every way, much like Vanessa Roveto herself." —Anna Dorn, author of Perfume & Pain
"Vanessa Roveto's Mulholland Dive is the newest entry into louche, brash, riveting Los Angeles poetry. '...a shopping list is a suicide note i’m performing.' Car crashes, smut, lesbian pillow talk...this isn't your grandma's poetry, but if it was, the world would be a better place. I am really impressed by this book." —Ben Fama, author of If I Close My Eyes
"This is the singular kind of book that calls to me. Mulholland Dive is a thing of strange beauty, jagged, mournful, orgasmic, sonically exhilarating. Vanessa Roveto uses language like Francis Bacon, grinding it until image and emotion are, in her words, meat-soft. Each fragment touches on the chaos of death and self and desire in 21st century Los Angeles, in such a precise, visceral, original way, it makes Lacan's objet petit a textually attainable." —Alistair McCartney, author of The Disintegrations
"Every line in Mulholland Dive sings a perfect note. A prismatic ode to the enduring enigmatic concept of Hollywood as a container for death and blondes, of lesbian heartbreak, of motherless and fatherless girls, of the human struggle to survive; Roveto has created a crucial work of art that contributes to our understanding of beauty as form, of womanhood, of what it means to love and hurt and be hurt." —Elle Nash, author of Deliver Me