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Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation
Meditations on time, space, and objects in houses, as well as lives of children, mothers, and non-human creatures in domestic spaces
Finalist for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry
Each of Brenda Hillman's books has been transformative for her readers, and her twelfth collection is no exception. Building on previous volumes about seasons, days and minutes, Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-twentieth century. Here, magical poems explore rooms as opportunities for dream, and domestic objects as the dream-shapes where culture and imagination inform each other. In that way, the poet celebrates the layered lives of children and adults, including, strikingly, the life of her mother, a native of Brazil whose presence intimately links the processes of inner vision and daily tasks. Like Hillman's other pioneering work, these poems are personal and collective; they braid the spiritual, the scientific, the political, and the visionary. Short spare lyrics are placed beside longer pieces; small photos add to the visual structures of the pages. One long prose poem explores the child's neurological anxiety and the awakening of mid-century environmental consciousness, while another is a meditation on women's domestic work with textiles and the rhetoric of literary repetition. The closing sequence gives homage to unlikely intersections of humans with non-human lives, including dust mites, moths, and mycorrhizal roots. This remarkable collection will plunge readers into the mysteries of childhood and of childhood houses everywhere.
[Sample Poem]
The newspaper
Sunlight crosses the room bearing elastic dust motes.
Clouds graze steadily over the house.
Trucks cross the suburbs; they have been cleared for departure.
The mother scours the morning paper for facts
& uplifting stories, laughing―
almost a little snort―
maybe it's disbelief, maybe
it's puffs of air pushed out by her idea of God.
In this line, it's the next century,
in this line the mother & her little laugh are gone,
in this line two ravens eat a carcass in Maryland,
a hurried driver doesn't hit a fawn,
the vote is being tallied, the red seeps across the map
& drips from the thick finger of Florida into a sea
of pre-named storms, & the sea of blood rises,
the small barge carrying corpses of fact & dream,
their bones wrapped together in newsprint.
Finalist for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry
Each of Brenda Hillman's books has been transformative for her readers, and her twelfth collection is no exception. Building on previous volumes about seasons, days and minutes, Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-twentieth century. Here, magical poems explore rooms as opportunities for dream, and domestic objects as the dream-shapes where culture and imagination inform each other. In that way, the poet celebrates the layered lives of children and adults, including, strikingly, the life of her mother, a native of Brazil whose presence intimately links the processes of inner vision and daily tasks. Like Hillman's other pioneering work, these poems are personal and collective; they braid the spiritual, the scientific, the political, and the visionary. Short spare lyrics are placed beside longer pieces; small photos add to the visual structures of the pages. One long prose poem explores the child's neurological anxiety and the awakening of mid-century environmental consciousness, while another is a meditation on women's domestic work with textiles and the rhetoric of literary repetition. The closing sequence gives homage to unlikely intersections of humans with non-human lives, including dust mites, moths, and mycorrhizal roots. This remarkable collection will plunge readers into the mysteries of childhood and of childhood houses everywhere.
[Sample Poem]
The newspaper
Sunlight crosses the room bearing elastic dust motes.
Clouds graze steadily over the house.
Trucks cross the suburbs; they have been cleared for departure.
The mother scours the morning paper for facts
& uplifting stories, laughing―
almost a little snort―
maybe it's disbelief, maybe
it's puffs of air pushed out by her idea of God.
In this line, it's the next century,
in this line the mother & her little laugh are gone,
in this line two ravens eat a carcass in Maryland,
a hurried driver doesn't hit a fawn,
the vote is being tallied, the red seeps across the map
& drips from the thick finger of Florida into a sea
of pre-named storms, & the sea of blood rises,
the small barge carrying corpses of fact & dream,
their bones wrapped together in newsprint.
- GenresPoetry
200 pages, Hardcover
Published September 8, 2026
About the author
Brenda Hillman
44 books59 followersBrenda Hillman (born March 27, 1951, in Tucson, Arizona) is an American poet and translator.
She is the author of ten collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, which was awarded the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
A professor of Creative Writing, she holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at Saint Mary's College of California, in Moraga, California.
Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2016, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
She is the author of ten collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, which was awarded the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
A professor of Creative Writing, she holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at Saint Mary's College of California, in Moraga, California.
Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2016, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
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October 20, 2026
Reviewing for PNReview.
November 7, 2026
Why haven’t more people read this??? Gorgeous.
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