January as a House You Walk Through: A Collection of Poems

by Alan Burkett

Author’s I’ve never experienced January as a clean beginning so much as a quiet return. The days feel less like a calendar and more like a house—entered slowly, room by room—where light, cold, memory, and habit all take their places without instruction. There is a rhythm to moving through such a space, a way of paying attention that doesn’t require improvement, only presence.

This book follows that movement. Each poem is a room, offering its own measure of stillness, humor, or reflection. Together, they imagine the month not as a test of resolve or a demand for change, but as a place to inhabit—to sit down, to listen, to notice what has already been living with us all along.

I didn’t write these poems to arrive anywhere in particular. They make no argument for transformation. What they offer instead is a practice of attention, and a quiet faith in the ordinary—the belief that what sustains us most often does so without spectacle. If there is any invitation here, it is simply to move slowly, to linger where you are, and to trust that staying present is already enough. —Alan Burkett

36 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 8, 2026