Lost Houses

By Maura MacNeil

A poet of wisdom and vision, one powerfully and tenderly in control of her craft, Maura MacNeil names the world we know, those seasons and places we believe are disappearing, with a language at times lush, at times clicking like nails on stone, at all times honest and lyrically pitched. With Lost Houses MacNeil pulls us past windows pried open with butter knives, dances us through wide open doors to those rooms that show us what the world will take and what might be recovered in the wake. This brilliant book heals as it harrows, redeems as it renders. As porch lights cast long ghosts growing bodies fleshed with the scars of lives lived deliberately, MacNeil invites us to haunt and to be haunted, asks how can we be afraid, and finds, in the weighted voice of rain, a rhythm for us to lean into each new day. -Matt Miller In Maura MacNeil's meditative and deeply moving collection Lost Houses, the weight of loss struggles against silence. These houses-hungry and haunting-call out through the shifting of light and seasons, reminding us that everything keeps its place only for a moment. In these poems, listening becomes a form of prayer and language becomes a way to name each piece of the past: cup, flagstone, windowpane, feather. In the face of uncertainty and doubt, MacNeil chooses wonder as a way to wrestle with the past. -Martha Andrews Donovan In Lost Houses Maura MacNeil introduces us to a world of ever evolving absence. A world where the expectations for what has come to pass are consistently thwarted and then rise again as subtle reflections; a world where "the body can't be trusted," where "there is a voice before words" and where "everything of matter remains but you can't recall the details." The houses that embody this world transcend its absences and flicker in its silences like strobed moonlight through immovable ghosts. MacNeil asks "where is the body hidden when it structures a story beyond body?" The answer is Lost Houses. This collection is a meditative fugue reconstructing the bodies of our past, forcing us to question whether the reclamational stories for what we've lost collectively represent a potential structure for our futures. In the pursuit of that question, Lost Houses' houses offer dangerously intoxicating mirrors that, as MacNeil cautions, want "you alone and will do anything now to keep you here." In that they are ceaselessly successful. And we should thank them. -Andrew Morgan

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 069264542X
• ISBN13: 9780692645420
• Release Date: March 2016
• Publisher: Aldrich Press
• Length: 74 Pages
• Weight: 0.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.2" x 6.0"