House You Cannot Reach

In HOUSE YOU CANNOT REACH, a mother’s voice is reimagined, amplified, and permitted to ventilate both forbidden grievance and private passion. Simultaneously wistful and excoriating, she cherishes and denounces a philandering husband and ponders the suicide of her youngest son. Whether needling a portfolio manager or reconnoitering the disappointing God of her Irish Catholic upbringing, she casts her sometimes witty, sometimes jaded regard on a society that pampered and grieved her. After a stroke, her restraint loosens even more radically. Her consciousness splinters as she proceeds to cajole the Virgin of Guadalupe, to hallucinate over Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and to brazenly equate her addled suffering with that of earthquake victims in Haiti. Complemented by poems in the poet’s voice that extend the territory of their mutual experience, this mother’s utterances discomfit and regale with terrifying and exultant fervor.