"A child is very ill; there is a hospital. . . . The subject is
as basic as a bowl and a nail, wood and a house, and a house on
fire." --Fanny Howe, from the introduction
"House and Fire" is a mother's love song to her stricken young
son, written over the years of his hospitalizations for an acute
immune disorder. Maria Hummel is a poet of dazzling formal mastery,
whose eerie, radiant lyrics and stories evoke the pediatric ward,
California life, and the immortal, endangered world of childhood.
This unforgettable debut was selected by Fanny Howe.
From "House and Fire":
"for thirty-three years"
"I didn't make anything"
"with my body"
"and thenyour brother"
"and thenhe sickened"
"watching him sleephooked to tubes"
"an empty envelopeinside me"
"fills each dawnwith one long love letter"
"by night"
"it's mostly apology"
A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Maria Hummel is the
author of two novels and poetry and prose in "Poetry," "Narrative,"
and "The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine." She
teaches at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco,
California.
Fanny Howe has written many books of poetry, and her "Selected
Poems" (UC Press, 2000) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
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