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What the House Knows
Edited by Diane Lockward
116 poems ~ 210 pages
Price: $21.00
Publisher: Terrapin Books
ISBN: 978-1-947896-78-9
To Order: Available through Ingram, your local bookstore, Amazon.com and other online retailers.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
What the House Knows is an anthology of 116 poems by 116 poets, poets such as Ted Kooser, Alice Friman, Billy Collins, Tracy K. Smith, Jan Beatty, and George Bilgere. Each poem features a house. Throughout the collection, you will find a variety of houses: old age homes, a schoolhouse, an outhouse, an abandoned farmhouse, rented apartments, and even a doghouse. The poems tell stories and hit the heart. There are poems about losing a house to fire, moving out of a house after divorce, remembering people who once lived in the house. You will also find a variety of people inhabiting the houses. And you will find poems in a variety of forms. As you move from poem to poem, from house to house, walk through the rooms known in Italy as stanzas. Listen to what the walls have to say.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
The first house I remember was a repurposed schoolhouse in rural central Illinois. Built in the 1920s, its outstanding features were negative: no indoor plumbing. An outhouse supplied with a Sears-Roebuck catalogue served the obvious purpose. Iron-infused orange water, from a windmill-driven pump, filled our water glasses at suppertime. Still, this is where loving parents prepared my brothers and me to face the world. Not surprisingly, “The Schoolhouse, 1820,” by Ginny Lowe Connors, is among my favorites in editor Diane Lockward’s stellar anthology. What the House Knows will satisfy poetry lovers at every level of interest.
–Michael Escoubas, author of Images: A Collection of Ekphrastic Poetry
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Diane Lockward is the editor of three previous poetry anthologies, most recently A Constellation of Kisses (Terrapin Books, 2019). She is also the editor of The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft (Terrapin Books, 2021) and three previous craft books, as well as the author of four poetry books, including The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement (Wind Publications, 2016). Her awards include the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize, a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Woman of Achievement Award. Her poems have been included in such journals as the Harvard Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Writer’s Almanac. She is the founder and publisher of Terrapin Books.
FROM THE BOOK:
The School House, 1820
by Ginny Lowe Connors
In a small town in Connecticut, not far
from the river, a schoolhouse holds its breath,
door closed for a few weeks in autumn
so children can help with apple picking.
At dawn two does and a fawn lift their heads
from goldenrod edging the schoolyard,
retreat into the uncleared woods nearby.
A possum rustles into its den beneath the woodshed.
Inside the schoolhouse, whispers and recitations,
stories and small dramas linger like a dream.
That scratching sound could be Joseph or Charity
practicing penmanship, but it is not.
Only a few mice working bits of hay into their hidden nest
or foraging for seeds, for any crumbs that might
have spilled in the cloakroom, where one
forgotten lunch tin, labeled Grant’s Fine Tobacco,
waits to be reclaimed. Double desks wait
in orderly rows, though they’re ink-stained
and carved with crude inscriptions.
Gouged into one–Hattie is a Pip.
(Hattie left the school two years ago,
but a bit of her story remains.)
On the wall behind the teacher’s desk
is a panel of wooden boards, painted black,
clouded a little by words and numbers
incompletely erased. Not gone–
just waiting to reappear, on foolscap booklets,
in children’s voices, or simply in minds, in memories.
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