Dominique Renda and Blake Horsleys Midnight Daydreams invites the reader on a journey through breathtaking and heartfelt landscapes of lives both recognizable and unforeseen. The authors candid poetic portraits offer compelling characters, and represent a deep slice of life, crystallizing moments, realizations, and dreams lost and found. Witty, heartbreaking, and inspiring, these poems affirm our humanity and rouse our spirit. Tales of a mothers feelings for her children, undying and impossible to suppress, a sons independent voice, a spry womans inquisitive perspective on time, an exhausted mans effort to reclaim it, veterans of war and adjustments, explorations of values and redemption, and the insight and passion of a creative life. Dominique Renda and Blake Horsley engage the reader in a conscious exploration of characters and poetic stories that bring us home. Transportive poetry. A moving collection. Truth and wonder artistically expressed in each characters authentic voice. Neal Menschel, Poet, Photojournalist A certain shared perspective. Is this commonality based in blood, in experience, in poetic sensibility? I find pondering these links and shadows enrich the overall effect of the work: each poem revealing both something about the subject as an individual and often as a part of a family, unique, yet related. Stephanie Newsom, Poet, Composer, Therapist