River House

by Sally Keith

Overview

“Heartbreaking and robust.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

These are poems of absence. Written after the loss of her mother, River House follows Sally Keith as she makes her way through the depths of grief, navigating a world newly transfigured. Incorporating her travels abroad, her experience studying the neutral mask technique developed by Jacques Lecoq, and her return to the river house she and her mother often visited, the poet assembles a guide to survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable pain. Even in the dark, Keith finds the ways we can be “filled with this unexpected feeling of living.”

River House is a profound new collection from one of the most prominent young poets at work today, addressing death, art, travel, and beauty—finding, in mourning, what it means to survive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571314659
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	04/21/2015
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Sally Keith is the author of three previous collections of poetry. Her first, Design was the winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize selected by Allen Grossman. In 2004, Dwelling Son was selected by Fanny Howe for the Contemporary Poetry Series. Most recently she released The Fact of the Matter. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and winner of numerous awards and fellowships, Keith is currently a member of the MFA Faculty at George Mason University and lives in Washington, D.C.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/03/2015
In this heartbreaking and robust poetry collection, Keith (The Fact of the Matter) explores the complexity of the mind in the midst of grief. The work consists of 63 untitled, numbered poems, reflecting the age of Keith's mother when she died. Keith's poems intertwine Jacques Lecoq's concept of the neutral mask with the poet's efforts to relearn how to behave, react, and move the body after loss—to be "ductile, as in, to be flexible, to be able to be deformed." Every observation realigns itself to the permeating experience of loss and the determined preservation of memory. Keith's poems never exceed a page and are built primarily of couplets and tercets; they possess a quiet music, and their intricate scatters of thought bear witness to the intimate struggles of mourning. "You erase the voice from the answering machine./ You move the clothes from the floor or tossed on a chair.// You hope to talk in different ways./ You drive, you eat, you move." Keith skirts the edges of thought, wandering from literature to the river house where her family spent time, a space that holds the strong presence of her mother. "That the river does nothing but move makes sense to me," Keith reflects, "yet, I cannot help but crave conclusion." (May)

Publishers Weekly

"No poet of her generation braids passion with intellect more impressively than Sally Keith. And in River House, Keith carries her talent to a whole new level. An elegy for the poet’s mother, River House is also an investigation of how we give our lives meaning and shape. At turns gorgeous, wry, and heartbreaking, these poems render the individual soul with a disarming immediacy. To read Sally Keith’s River House is to feel grief and bewilderment verging into sheer wonder."
—Peter Campion

"River because we are moving inexorably forward; house because we are locked forever to the past. Preternaturally calm even as they twist and turn against themselves, the sixty-three poems of River House feel as if they’re happening in the time it takes to read them, except that when you’re finished with River House, your dream comes true: you can read the poems again. I do not know of a book of poems that embodies more heartbreakingly or more intelligently the experience of irreconcilable loss."
—James Longenbach

“'What kind of metamorphosis is death: beautiful or utilitarian?' What the mourner learns about the end of the world is that you have to keep on living. We learn by doing; River House is a book of spiritual exercises that seem at first to require no belief but attention. Only at the end of Sally Keith’s extraordinary collection do we realize what’s here to be believed in isn’t experience, but beauty itself, the human work of reading and looking and loving, anything that stops in our tracks, anything that asks us to rush to its side. The poems focus the reader with a hunger so intelligent , so real, and so immediate, you forget you’re reading a poem, and simply remember there’s something vital you must do. It’s like looking at the moon while watching the stars disappear: don’t you look harder? These poems are clear and strange. They illuminate without consolation. The world has ended many times in our contemporary literary landscape, but rarely has it started over with such agility, economy and elegance."
—Katie Peterson

"Heartbreaking and robust . . . Keith's poems possess a quiet music, and their intricate scatters of thought bear witness to the intimate struggles of mourning."—Publishers Weekly STARRED Review

From the Publisher