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Earlier this summer, our geriatric air conditioner stopped working, bringing an abrupt end to a few years of never-quite-cold-enough temperatures and bafflingly-high electric bills. Our HVAC guy broke the bad news: the system required a total replacement, plus re-insulation of our attic, plus ductwork for an addition that had inexplicably never been connected to the central AC. That ductwork needed a way to travel from our crawl space to the attic, which is how I found myself dragging coats, boxes, and bags from the hall closet into the guest room and sorting through papers I hadn’t seen since the pandemic.
Buried under old bills and lesson plans were the earliest notes for the project that would eventually become my fourth poetry collection. Called Broken Houses, the book broadly considers the house as both physical structure and metaphor, source of both shelter and anxiety. Like many Americans, I grew up always worried about money, afraid my family was one calamity away from “losing the house.” And like an unfortunate number of Americans, we did lose our house—or at least most of its contents—though the cause was a natural versus financial disaster in the form of a category 5 hurricane. Writing the collection was a way for me to make sense of my own relationship to home, money, and social class while telling larger stories of erasure and dispossession.
