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Open House: Poems
Open House is the year 2001 winner of the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry
for a First Book. We at Zoo are eminently pleased to have such a fine
book of verse for our inaugural Kenyon Review Prize volume. Fennelly's
poems are well poised in their witty and sometime sassy ruminations,
often "maximalist" in their scope (see "From L' HUtel Terminus
Notebooks") and the pleasure one takes within them is of the rarest
breed: it is the pleasure of unexpected revelation. Open House comes
introduced by series judge and Kenyon Review poetry editor, David Baker.
for a First Book. We at Zoo are eminently pleased to have such a fine
book of verse for our inaugural Kenyon Review Prize volume. Fennelly's
poems are well poised in their witty and sometime sassy ruminations,
often "maximalist" in their scope (see "From L' HUtel Terminus
Notebooks") and the pleasure one takes within them is of the rarest
breed: it is the pleasure of unexpected revelation. Open House comes
introduced by series judge and Kenyon Review poetry editor, David Baker.
- GenresPoetry
76 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
2 people are currently reading
118 people want to read
About the author
Beth Ann Fennelly
29 books204 followersBeth Ann Fennelly is the author of
Tender Hooks: Poems
and
Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
. A professor of English at the University of Mississippi, Fennelly lives with her husband and children in Oxford, Mississippi.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
July 6, 2017
This is my favorite Beth Ann Fennelly poem, which happens to be in this collection, Open House.
Asked for a Happy Memory of her Father, She Recalls Wrigley Field
His drinking was different in sunshine,
as if it couldn't be bad. Sudden, manic,
he swung into a laugh, bought me
two ice creams, said One for each hand.
Half the hot inning I licked Good Humor
running down wrists. My bird-mother
earlier, packing my pockets with sun block,
has hopped her warning: Be careful.
So, pinned between his knees, I held
his Old Style in both hands
while he streaked the sun block on my cheeks
and slurred My little Indian princess.
Home run: the hairy necks of men in front
jumped up, thighs torn from gummy green bleachers
to join the violent scramble. Father
held me close and said Be careful,
be careful. But why should I be full of care
with his thick arm circling my shoulders,
with a high smiling sun, like a home run,
in the upper right-hand corner of the sky?
This is another favorite of mine from the collection:
Poem Not to be Read at Your Wedding
You ask me for a poem about love
in place of a wedding present, trying to save me
money. For three nights I've lain
under the glow-in-the-dark-stars I've stuck to the ceiling
over my bed. I've listened to the songs
of the galaxy. Well, Carmen, I would rather
give you your third set of steak knives
than tell you what I know. Let me find you
some other, store-bought present. Don't
make me warn you of stars, how they see us
from that distance as miniature and breakable
from the bride who tops the wedding cake
to the Mary on Pinto dashboards
holding her ripe, red heart in her hands.
I like many of these poems in this collection, but I also like “Why I Can't Cook for Your Self-Centered Architect Cousin” which gets at her persistent sense of humor. (The End Notes includes her recipe for pesto that the architect cousin won’t get to taste).
The center of the collection is “From L'Hotel Terminus Notebooks,” which is a notebooky poem that gets at four sources of inspiration for her poetry, four categories from which art is drawn: ambition, love, religion and death. This long poem or section of poems (and stuff) features excerpts from the journals of Stephen Dunn, and other writers, lines from poems she has been reading, an archeological dig of sources for ideas for poems, for tones, inclinations, language, loves. It also features a kind of dialogue with an interlocutor, Mr Daylater, who reminds me of John Berryman's Mr. Bones. This section of poems is interesting, in part an answer to a question poets get at the end of a poetry reading: “Where do your poems come from?”
This is an excerpt from a section in Hotel on death, to kinda get the feel of it:
“Each region in Ireland has a distinct pattern for its fishermen sweaters.
The sweaters are a great favorite with the tourists.
The patterns originated as a way of telling, when a fisherman
washed up on shore with his face nibbled off, where
to send the body.”
Boom! That kind of bold slap of an image is pretty typical of her work. The book sort of folds in on itself, with the hotel section in the center, poems on language and death and love folding in to that section of "sources." Fennel's kind of like Sharon Olds in that she writes as boldly and graphically of sex as she does of death, and can be as tender and lyrical as she can be blunt and snarky.
Other books I like from her? Tenderhooks was my favorite (so far!):
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9...
Unmentionables, too:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
Asked for a Happy Memory of her Father, She Recalls Wrigley Field
His drinking was different in sunshine,
as if it couldn't be bad. Sudden, manic,
he swung into a laugh, bought me
two ice creams, said One for each hand.
Half the hot inning I licked Good Humor
running down wrists. My bird-mother
earlier, packing my pockets with sun block,
has hopped her warning: Be careful.
So, pinned between his knees, I held
his Old Style in both hands
while he streaked the sun block on my cheeks
and slurred My little Indian princess.
Home run: the hairy necks of men in front
jumped up, thighs torn from gummy green bleachers
to join the violent scramble. Father
held me close and said Be careful,
be careful. But why should I be full of care
with his thick arm circling my shoulders,
with a high smiling sun, like a home run,
in the upper right-hand corner of the sky?
This is another favorite of mine from the collection:
Poem Not to be Read at Your Wedding
You ask me for a poem about love
in place of a wedding present, trying to save me
money. For three nights I've lain
under the glow-in-the-dark-stars I've stuck to the ceiling
over my bed. I've listened to the songs
of the galaxy. Well, Carmen, I would rather
give you your third set of steak knives
than tell you what I know. Let me find you
some other, store-bought present. Don't
make me warn you of stars, how they see us
from that distance as miniature and breakable
from the bride who tops the wedding cake
to the Mary on Pinto dashboards
holding her ripe, red heart in her hands.
I like many of these poems in this collection, but I also like “Why I Can't Cook for Your Self-Centered Architect Cousin” which gets at her persistent sense of humor. (The End Notes includes her recipe for pesto that the architect cousin won’t get to taste).
The center of the collection is “From L'Hotel Terminus Notebooks,” which is a notebooky poem that gets at four sources of inspiration for her poetry, four categories from which art is drawn: ambition, love, religion and death. This long poem or section of poems (and stuff) features excerpts from the journals of Stephen Dunn, and other writers, lines from poems she has been reading, an archeological dig of sources for ideas for poems, for tones, inclinations, language, loves. It also features a kind of dialogue with an interlocutor, Mr Daylater, who reminds me of John Berryman's Mr. Bones. This section of poems is interesting, in part an answer to a question poets get at the end of a poetry reading: “Where do your poems come from?”
This is an excerpt from a section in Hotel on death, to kinda get the feel of it:
“Each region in Ireland has a distinct pattern for its fishermen sweaters.
The sweaters are a great favorite with the tourists.
The patterns originated as a way of telling, when a fisherman
washed up on shore with his face nibbled off, where
to send the body.”
Boom! That kind of bold slap of an image is pretty typical of her work. The book sort of folds in on itself, with the hotel section in the center, poems on language and death and love folding in to that section of "sources." Fennel's kind of like Sharon Olds in that she writes as boldly and graphically of sex as she does of death, and can be as tender and lyrical as she can be blunt and snarky.
Other books I like from her? Tenderhooks was my favorite (so far!):
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9...
Unmentionables, too:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
January 2, 2025
The first completed book of 2025. I’m glad it was poetry. Perhaps I’ll be better about reading more poetry this year. That’s my hope.
I really love Beth Ann Fennelly’s perspective on life. She sees the pain, the beauty, the joy. And riding under it all and through it is her love for Tommy. Having a love in your life that shapes you and yet still leaves you free; being in awe of that man. Every time she writes about it I recognize myself.
I really love Beth Ann Fennelly’s perspective on life. She sees the pain, the beauty, the joy. And riding under it all and through it is her love for Tommy. Having a love in your life that shapes you and yet still leaves you free; being in awe of that man. Every time she writes about it I recognize myself.
September 17, 2013
As long as there has been poetry there have been women who write it erotically. Edna St Vincent Millay comes to mind, and Adrienne Rich. And my favorite, Sharon Olds. They write frankly about their sexuality. I can't think of another woman poet who writes as openly about doing sex as Fennelly. Such men as John Montague and Walter Benton do it, and wonderfully. But their eroticism is cradled in love poetry without the explicit. Fennelly's poetry of this sort sings of the erotic rather than her sexuality, and it's nestled within nostalgia. In fact, when reading Fennelly I always have an earworm of a song going through my head: Bob Seger's Night Moves of many years ago. I find myself walking around the house singing it--quite well, if I do say so myself. Or reciting its rhymed lyrics at the breakfast table. Fennelly's poetry, and not just the love poetry, affects me in a personal way, not only evoking Seger's nostalgic song about drive-in love and awakening to the mysteries of sex, but also reenergizing feelings of youth and wonder and possibility. The centerpiece of Open House is a long poem called From L'Hotel Terminus Notebooks. It's much darker. Constructed of fragments of information that could originate from any source in a busy modern life, I interpret it as confessional in character. And it's overseen by a kind of interlocutor called Mr Daylater who reminds me of Berryman's Mr Bones. Maybe he's a kind of inner persona who acts to keep the poet honest. In the end, as an example of the eroticism (rather than sexuality) seemingly never far from the surface of her poetry, Mr Daylater teases from her the color of her panties. My favorite poem here is very gentle, a childhood memory of seeing a ball game at Wrigley Field with her father. Since being introduced to Fennelly's poetry during the summer I've read her completely, I think, and like her very much. I look forward to whatever she publishes next.
March 30, 2021
Picked a copy of this up because her poem "What I Think About When Someone Uses 'Pussy' as a Synonym for Weak" absolutely floored me (despite its, imo, terrible title). But this collection was not my style. It's not bad writing, but I'm already not particularly inclined to like poetry, so it was too much for me. That said, it's almost 2 decades old, so I'll probably try a newer collection and see if it resonates more.
July 18, 2022
"The irony of metaphor: / you are closest to something / when naming what it's not"
"His drinking was different in sunshine, / as if it couldn't be bad."
"What's wrong? What's right? To live was right. To know / that you could take the heart and eat it raw."
"I love the ghostly dotted lines on Nevada maps, place markers / for where the lakes would be if they had water."
"'Ambition and art: / When Michelangelo's statue of Moses, one of his last, was / unveiled, Michelangelo attacked it, beating it with his fists and / screaming, 'Why aren't you alive? Speak!'"
"My sister wears a mouth guard because she grinds her grief."
"Poetry late at night: / I read 'tombstone' where it says 'trombone.'"
"Grief is like that sometimes: after a long / while you can find it no longer fits."
"His drinking was different in sunshine, / as if it couldn't be bad."
"What's wrong? What's right? To live was right. To know / that you could take the heart and eat it raw."
"I love the ghostly dotted lines on Nevada maps, place markers / for where the lakes would be if they had water."
"'Ambition and art: / When Michelangelo's statue of Moses, one of his last, was / unveiled, Michelangelo attacked it, beating it with his fists and / screaming, 'Why aren't you alive? Speak!'"
"My sister wears a mouth guard because she grinds her grief."
"Poetry late at night: / I read 'tombstone' where it says 'trombone.'"
"Grief is like that sometimes: after a long / while you can find it no longer fits."
December 7, 2020
This was better than her first collection A Different Kind of Hunger. There are some repeats but her best ones I think.
I don't know how to describe her style but I like it immensely. I love her candor and perspective.
I don't know how to describe her style but I like it immensely. I love her candor and perspective.
July 19, 2018
Rating poetry is hard. I probably only adored 50% of the poems in this collection, but they will be ones that stick with me for good. I'll read anything else Fennelly writes.
March 3, 2022
literally one of the best books i’ve ever read
April 4, 2022
Serious poems can be funny. Or funny poems can be serious.
Read
November 16, 2011Poets with a single collection and those sponsored by less well-known presses, as was the case with Beth Ann Fennelly and Sarah Kennedy in 2001, can be overlooked at large gatherings and festivals. But as one who enjoys the tough-minded marriage of story and song, I made certain to catch these two's appearances at the Southern Festival of Books that year. Both native Midwesterners, Kennedy and Fennelly write poems that plumb love’s complexities, especially the kind that begins with our original families and becomes repeated, for better and for worse, with marriage and children.
DOUBLE EXPOSURE, Kennedy’s award-winning collection published by the Cleveland State Poetry Center, uses verse as a vehicle for memoir, which achieves a moral imperative in her hands: remembering for this poet, isn’t a means of navel-gazing or an excuse for solipsism; instead, it’s an art form that requires telling the truth unprettified by good manners or the comforts of beauty. Fennelly’s conversational and winningly humorous style doesn’t ignore the heart’s sorrows, as indicated by a poem titled “Not to Be Read at Your Wedding,” from her book OPEN HOUSE, published by Zoo Press and winner of the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize, which appeared with an introduction by David Baker, this year himself the winner of the Theodore Roethke Prize (http://www.svsu.edu/roethke/roethke-m... coincidentally enough, both writers are now with W. W. Norton, who reprinted Fennelly's début collection in 2009.
Kennedy (see a recent poem and brief essay explaining her newest, historically based work on the NEA site: http://www.nea.gov/features/writers/w...) and Fennelly (who has published a memoir and another collection of poems, TENDER HOOKS, also from Norton, and an essay on the site of the Academy of American Poets website which induces the state about which she's writing, "flow"--http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/pr...) are hard-hitting poets whose work offers many accessible—and essential—pleasures.
(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE / Village Voice Media, 2001 and updated November 2011)
DOUBLE EXPOSURE, Kennedy’s award-winning collection published by the Cleveland State Poetry Center, uses verse as a vehicle for memoir, which achieves a moral imperative in her hands: remembering for this poet, isn’t a means of navel-gazing or an excuse for solipsism; instead, it’s an art form that requires telling the truth unprettified by good manners or the comforts of beauty. Fennelly’s conversational and winningly humorous style doesn’t ignore the heart’s sorrows, as indicated by a poem titled “Not to Be Read at Your Wedding,” from her book OPEN HOUSE, published by Zoo Press and winner of the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize, which appeared with an introduction by David Baker, this year himself the winner of the Theodore Roethke Prize (http://www.svsu.edu/roethke/roethke-m... coincidentally enough, both writers are now with W. W. Norton, who reprinted Fennelly's début collection in 2009.
Kennedy (see a recent poem and brief essay explaining her newest, historically based work on the NEA site: http://www.nea.gov/features/writers/w...) and Fennelly (who has published a memoir and another collection of poems, TENDER HOOKS, also from Norton, and an essay on the site of the Academy of American Poets website which induces the state about which she's writing, "flow"--http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/pr...) are hard-hitting poets whose work offers many accessible—and essential—pleasures.
(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE / Village Voice Media, 2001 and updated November 2011)
April 15, 2015
Simply stunning, nothing more to add. Fennelly is a force, and this house is one I want to visit again and again. The long title poem perfectly captures the Daylater critic's voice: "This won't work, you know." Any writer who has sighed at a manuscript she once thought brilliant will instantly recognize what Fennelly has done here. Her perspective on writing is not only interesting to poets themselves, but anyone with a critical perspective on her own life and choices. This collection is a winner.
November 25, 2013
I feel like I am so inexperienced with poetry as to not be a great judge of anything. I feel like this might be a 3 star book, but I'll leave it at 4 because I am insecure. There is a nice balance of bigger themes and self-revation, of dense metaphor and clearer experience and analogy. There weren't any lines that really spoke to me, however. Maybe on a second read.
December 21, 2023
I'd like to say that I picked this book up because I read a poem in it that just bowled me over. But the fact is, I got it as a gift from a professor after Ms. Fennelly did a reading at my Undergrad College.
That being said, this is such a great collection. As a woman, I came out of it a little prouder in my own feminine strength.
That being said, this is such a great collection. As a woman, I came out of it a little prouder in my own feminine strength.
October 3, 2007
My absolute favorite book of english-language poetry.
September 14, 2020
I have to show my support for the other Beth Ann/Anne poets of the world!
January 21, 2008
"Poem not to be read at your wedding" is fantastic. It's hard for me to give this 4 stars, but there were only two poems that I loved. That one is almost worth a 5 star rating on its own, though.
February 11, 2008
Saw her read in person. Just stunning. A great collection.
April 30, 2008
Poems from this book that I particularly liked:
The Insecurities of Great Men
The Snake Charmer
Why I Can't Cook for Your Self-Centered Architect Cousin
The Insecurities of Great Men
The Snake Charmer
Why I Can't Cook for Your Self-Centered Architect Cousin
January 12, 2011
I wish I could half stars. Great debut collection.
August 31, 2011
LOVE!
September 16, 2011
I particularly love the 'notebook' poem(s) in the middle of the book: it (they) inspired much (all) of my undergraduate poetry portfolio.
Read
December 3, 2011good to read. for its word play, accessibility, range of ideas, openness, acknowledgment of modern situations, and disconcert.
and after reading you will know why my review sounds such.
and after reading you will know why my review sounds such.
November 11, 2013
My favorite of all of Beth-Ann's work! She has been a dear friend, colleague and mentor. The personality, poetic rhythm, diction, syntax, I can go on and on.. Brilliantly written.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews