House and Fire

Maria Hummel

APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner

Written over the years of her son’s hospitalizations for an acute immune disorder, Hummel’s poetry takes the burdened life and imagery of illness—the hospital room, the IV tubes, the white bed—and transforms them with songs and stories of astonishing revelation. As House and Fire moves through physical landscapes—the pediatric ward, New York, California—and the emotional terrain of a painful miscarriage, it alternates eerie, radiant narratives and traditional forms to illuminate the effects of disease on the body and time. Yet the book’s greatest accomplishment is how deeply Hummel takes her readers, poem by poem, into a mother’s broken-hearted love. House and Fire proves that poetry can provide a dwelling place for powerful feeling, and the meaning that makes it burn.

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ISBN: 9780971898127

Format: Paperback

Station

Days you are sick, we get dressed slow,

find our hats, and ride the train.

We pass a junkyard and the bay,

then a dark tunnel, then a dark tunnel.

 

You lose your hat. I find it. The train

sighs open at Burlingame,

past dark tons of scrap and water.

I carry you down the black steps.

 

Burlingame is the size of joy:

a race past bakeries, gold rings

in open black cases. I don’t care

who sees my crooked smile

 

or what erases it, past the bakery,

when you tire. We ride the blades again

beside the crooked bay. You smile.

I hold you like a hole holds light.

 

We wear our hats and ride the knives.

They cannot fix you. They try and try.

Tunnel! Into the dark open we go.

Days you are sick, we get dressed slow.

About the Author

Maria Hummel’s poetry has appeared in The Pushcart Prizes: Best of the Small Presses, Joy: 100 Poems, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, as well as in numerous magazines including Poetry, Narrative, and New England Review. She is also the author of three novels, most recently Still Lives, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick, a Book of the Month Club pick, and a BBC Culture Best Book of 2018.

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Reviews

“These poems come from a deep well of experience that is translated, right in front of us, into hard-won craft and exacting lyricism. At one level, this book registers the story of a beloved child’s illness. But at a deeper level, these poems are a narrative of language itself: of its vigil, its journey, its ability—even in dark times—to shelter the frailty of the body with its own radiant strengths. This is a superb and memorable collection.” —Eavan Boland

“There is real wisdom in Maria Hummel’s House and Fire, a burnished understanding of self and parenthood, what it means to be mortal through the illness of a loved one. These intricately structured, deeply moving, alchemical poems transform sorrow into something beautiful and true. Her startling use of tone and imagery is both precise and uncanny, as if the terrors of experience can be redeemed through the conditions of music and imagination. Here is a young poet in full command of her gifts. I cannot think of a more powerful first book.” —Stuart Dischell

“In this particular shadowland, the poet creates a new language from the flames of the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the unknowable. Hummel’s is that rare art of lyrical distillation that gives us meaning and sanity in a time of terror. House and Fire is crushing and remarkable.” —Michael McGriff