a poem is a house by linda ravenswood
Madville Press, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-956440-65-2
paperback
$18.95 ISBN:
978-1-956440-66-9
ebook $9.99
“a poem is a house,” Linda Ravenswood declares in her newest collection. But if by “house,” you think of a few simple rooms contained in a wooden frame, you’ve missed the point. This “house” encompasses more and vaster rooms than the container could seem to hold, rooms and crannies and burrows and underground passageways that lead back in time to a history both personal and social. The “house” enfolds everything that ever was or will be, like human consciousness.
We all live in the house, too. We “…live at the scene of an accident.” We “…go on living at the scene of a crime.” This “house” that Ravenswood invokes can neither be comfortably occupied, nor ever fully escaped. As it turns out, a poem is many things—a city, a woman, a war, a diaspora. There are some truths too deep, too complex and layered to be revealed simply. Ravenswood’s collection gathers meaning as you read, relying on juxtapositions between poems and motifs that recur with slight changes to deliver its powerful statement. While each poem delivers an experience on its own, it is through the accumulation of images and musics that you come to fully realize its dimensions. Perhaps we might consider it a book-length poem, or a house that can be read from attic to basement to the bones beneath.
A modern “house” relies on walls to keep inside distinct from outside, to afford the illusion of privacy between one space to the next. Ravenswood reveals the flimsy nature and permeability of these walls, the lie of borders and of the notion that one group can be separate from other. We are interdependent; our actions affect one another across time, across space, through the rickety partitions we attempt to construct. Even the boundaries of time are useless in this “house” the poet composes for us because, in her words: “…this is not really a lullaby for the end of the world this is the beginning of the body.” The body that houses the poem.
linda ravenswood BFA MA, PhD abd is a poet and performance artist from Los Angeles. Her accolades include an Oxford Prize in Poetry (2022) and the Edwin Markham Prize in Poetry (2023). She is the founding editor of The Los Angeles Press, est. 2018, and the co-founder of the Poet Laureate program in Glendale, California. Her recent collections include Cantadora—letters from California (Eyewear London/The Black Spring Press Group, 2023), The Stan Poems (Pedestrian Press, 2022), Tlacuilx—Tongues in Quarantine (HINCHAS Press, 2021), and XLA Poets (HINCHAS Press, 2020). Find her at thelosangelespress.com6
Terry Wolverton is author of twelve books of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, including *Embers*, a novel in poems, *Insurgent Muse: art and life at the Woman’s Building,* a memoir*, *and her most recent novel, *Season of Eclipse*. She has also edited sixteen literary compilations. She is the founder of Writers At Work, a creative writing studio in Los Angeles, and Affiliate Faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. http://terrywolverton.net