Will Dowd loved books. Unfortunately, reading them became physically impossible. The words did not disappear; they began to move. A binocular vision disorder caused printed words to shake in his field of vision until reading—the activity that had shaped much of his life—became painful and eventually inaccessible. Dowd describes the loss as an exile from the world of books. Rather than accept that expulsion quietly, he tried something wonderfully strange: if he could no longer enter literature while awake, perhaps literature could enter him while he slept.
That experiment became The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires, a collection of surreal stories created through dream incubation. Working with Dormio, a device developed through the MIT Media Lab that monitors the transition into sleep, Dowd listened to recordings from Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room as he drifted into dreams. For a year, lines from poets became what he calls “dream seeds,” and upon waking, he recorded what his unconscious had made of them. The resulting collection is imaginative, funny, disturbing, and frequently tender. Its greatest achievement is not that Dowd finds a way to replace reading. He does not. Instead, the book asks a more complicated question: what can creativity make from something that cannot be recovered?
Each story begins with a poetic dream seed, but anyone expecting the story that follows to interpret the poem will quickly discover that dreams do not cooperate so neatly. Dowd himself admits that poetry affected his dreams only “glancingly.” Dreams, he concludes, are “wild creatures with their own agendas,” unwilling to perform simply because someone asks them to. That unpredictability becomes the collection’s method. A line from a poem may supply an image, an emotion, a word, or apparently nothing recognizable at all. The pleasure lies partly in watching language enter the unconscious and emerge transformed.
The danger of a premise this inventive is that invention can become its own distraction. At times, Dowd’s surrealism calls so much attention to itself that I found myself anticipating the next imaginative trick rather than investing in the person experiencing it. His stories contain ghosts, witches, disembodied eyes, talking animals, portals, transformations, and impossible worlds. When those devices remain primarily clever, the characters can seem secondary to the conceit. Dowd is strongest when the strangeness eventually becomes almost invisible because something recognizably human—grief, loneliness, fear, memory, or love—takes its place.
“That Dog” accomplishes this beautifully. Inspired by Denise Levertov’s “Overland to the Islands,” the story is narrated by a service dog whose elderly owner has died. Barred from the funeral because dogs are not permitted inside the church, he waits outside, eventually follows the hearse across town, and finds her grave by smell. He lies on the mound of fresh dirt and fights the instinct to dig. The premise could easily become sentimental, but Dowd lets the dog remain a dog. He notices smells, food, squirrels, and the practical details of his former job.
The emotional weight arrives when he returns to the apartment. His owner’s scent remains everywhere, but there are no longer slippers to move, lights to manage, or other services to perform. There is simply nothing left for him to do. Unable to sleep without the sound of her labored breathing, he finally climbs onto the sofa, breaking a rule that mattered when she was alive. Beneath the humor is a painful question: who are we when the person or purpose around which we organized our life disappears? The dog’s grief works because Dowd does not explain it. He gives it behavior.
“The Centipede” uses fantasy differently. An eight-year-old girl rides through a hailstorm with her dangerously intoxicated father, secretly casting spells that keep their truck from sliding off the road. Her father has no idea she is a witch, and she barely understands it herself. What she does understand is that keeping them alive is her responsibility, and she has been doing it for much of her childhood. The supernatural premise makes literal something painfully recognizable: a child attempting to control an adult’s chaos. Magic becomes less a superpower than a survival strategy.
Other pieces are more successful as intellectual games than emotional experiences. In “Glassen,” for example, a narrator’s eyeballs fall into a restaurant fish tank. One eventually returns while the other develops legs, hides in the aquarium, and decides that remaining separated from its owner may be better for its emotional health. The absurdity is memorable, and the independent eye can be read as a wonderfully bizarre representation of separation from oneself. Still, the cleverness kept me at a greater distance than “That Dog” did. I admired what Dowd invented without caring as deeply about whom it happened to.
Yet even the collection’s strangest pieces contribute to its larger preoccupations. Again and again, Dowd crosses boundaries: waking and dreaming, life and death, human and animal, memory and forgetting, body and mind. Characters disappear, return, transform, or find themselves stranded between worlds. Literature itself behaves similarly. A poet speaks words years or decades earlier; those words survive in an archive; Dowd hears them while falling asleep; his unconscious transforms them into a dream; and waking Dowd turns the dream into another piece of literature. Creation becomes a chain in which no one completely controls what the next person—or the next mind—will make.
That architecture is what keeps The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires from becoming merely a collection of unrelated oddities. The continuous story underneath the individual stories belongs to Dowd himself. He begins by trying to regain access to something he loves and discovers instead that loss can redirect creativity without repairing the original wound.
Importantly, Dowd does not force that discovery into a tidy redemption story. He still misses reading. He still describes himself as shut outside its gates. But he also recognizes that without being forced into this unfamiliar territory, he would never have encountered these dreams or written them into a book—a book he notes, with painful irony, that he will never read.
The acknowledgements provide an unexpectedly moving final turn. Dowd thanks his parents for visiting laboratories, searching libraries, and reading the stories aloud to him. They did, he writes, what he can now do only in dreams. The circle is remarkable: a man who loses the ability to read listens to poets in order to dream, turns those dreams into stories, and then listens while someone else reads his own words back to him.
That may be the collection’s most compelling achievement. The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires does not argue that loss is secretly a gift. Dowd never gets back what was taken from him, and the book is stronger because it refuses that easy consolation. Instead, it demonstrates that creativity can exist beside loss. Dowd goes searching for a way back into literature and finds himself somewhere else entirely: between another poet’s words and his own unconscious, in that fleeting territory where a dream is disappearing but has not yet vanished. His task is simply to catch what remains.