Dial-up and Day Dreams
Poetry and prose Volume I
Poetry Anthology by Britt Wolfe
Slip off your shoes, press play on the mixtape, and come home to the glow of a computer screen humming with possibility. In Dial-Up and Daydreams, Volume I of the Poetry and Prose series, Britt Wolfe captures the aching tenderness of growing up in a world that was just beginning to log on.
With each page, Wolfe resurrects the magic of the in-between—the era of landlines and late-night chats, VHS tapes and voicemails, daydreams and dial-tones. It’s a love letter to friendship bracelets and fuzzy butterfly clips, to the girls we were and the women we’ve become.
This anthology blends poetry and prose into an intimate, emotionally resonant collection that speaks to anyone who ever scribbled in the margins of a notebook or fell in love with the idea of someone through a glowing screen. Dial-Up and Daydreams is tender, nostalgic, and beautifully honest—a mirror held up to a generation raised on MSN Messenger and messy first love.
But it’s more than nostalgia—it’s an exploration of how memory lingers. The poems move between innocence and ache, joy and regret, reminding us that the past is never gone. It lingers in the songs that still make our hearts race, in the scent of lip gloss and vanilla body spray, in the quiet ache of a first heartbreak we thought we’d outgrown.
Wolfe writes with a voice that is both deeply personal and universally familiar. Each piece is an invitation back to a bedroom lit by Christmas lights and plastered with posters, where secrets were whispered over landlines stretched across hallways and love was something both terrifying and inevitable.
There is humour woven into the heartbreak, too—the clumsy AIM screen names, the overused away messages, the desperate hope that someone would notice us in a chatroom crowded with strangers. Through it all, Wolfe reminds us that these awkward beginnings were the building blocks of the people we are now, that every misspelled status update and every unreturned call carried us closer to ourselves.
For those who came of age in the analogue-to-digital shift, Dial-Up and Daydreams is a time capsule. For those who didn’t, it’s a doorway—an intimate glimpse into a world both simpler and more complicated than it seemed.
For everyone who still remembers the sound of the internet connecting, and the feeling of yourself disconnecting just to survive—it’s time to log back in. To remember. To honour the messy, magnificent girl you were—and to see how far she’s carried you.
