About the House

Composed over the course of a single year, the three sequences in Stacy Szymaszek's tenth book, About the House, make room through attention. The rituals that provoke these poems are rooted in conversation and communion, joining chance encounter with the familiar. Drawing on journal writing, folk poetics, prayer, and bibliomancy, Szymaszek explores the intimacies of sharing space with human, plant, ghost, and animal others. "I sit and think and in thinking / I mind my own business," Szymaszek writes, making solitude both social and generative. Rife with the materials of a day—sprouting onions, lemon oil, snake hash, gossip, a broken stove, and correspondence—the poems in About the House are crafty and magnetic.