This House That

by Peter Grandbois

In poems that open into a maze of rooms and walls, Peter Grandbois takes on marriage, fatherhood, the ravages of family life. He brings a piercing, dreamlike attention to everything in a packed household that isn’t there: what can’t be said, what shouldn’t be said. At once harrowing and deeply tender, This House That tracks the intensity of living too close to one another, the sense of being trapped inside a solace you once chose. There is physical urgency in these poems—the need to change—and music in the plea for mystery and design, for a home inside the house, for “unuttered lives.”—Joanna Klink

Like sleepwalkers, or “astronaut(s) untethered” the couple in this suite of love-elegies drift inexorably apart. Their house becomes a form of purgatory. The walls strain to contain the unspoken, pretenses that provide no relief, in a theatre of regret and lapsed desire. Grandbois peels the roof off this home, so we can peer in, as, one by one, the poems steer the reader through the dissolution of a family. Each poem is borne up by the music of imbibed silences and a dignified, contained grace. --Amy Gerstler

Peter Grandbois' haunting new collection, This House That, offers an extended study in spare and elegant grieving for a self detached from itself by a marriage that is over but not gone. In a compressed vocabulary of ruin so spare and lyrical we're stunned at the few eruptions of raw human speech, Grandbois understands the tyranny of silence like no one else.--Leslie Miller

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2017

About the author

Peter Grandbois is the author of sixteen books, including: The Gravedigger (2006), selected by Barnes and Noble for its “Discover Great New Writers” program, Nahoonkara, winner of the gold medal in literary fiction in Foreword magazine's Book of the Year Awards for 2011, the novel, half-burnt (finalist in the category of Multicultural Fiction in the 2019 INDIES), a collection of surreal flash fictions, Domestic Disturbances (Publisher’s Weekly pick for Best Book of 2013), as well as its companion volume of fictions, Domestic Bestiary (2023) and four novella collections or “monster double features,” Wait Your Turn, The Glob Who Girdled Granville (honorable mention, IndieFab award for fantasy book of the year in 2014), The Girl on the Swing (Silver Medalist in the category of Best Fantasy of 2015 in the IndieFab awards), and Cat People and Dream Memories of the Fifty Foot Woman (finalist for Best Fantasy in the INDIES awards 2025), as well as the poetry collections, This House That (winner of the Brighthorse Books Poetry Prize and Honorable Mention for the INDIES award in the category of best poetry collection of 2017), The Three-Legged World (Etruscan, 2020), everything has become birds (Brighthorse, 2021), the Snyder prize-winning collection, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021), and Story of a Pilgrim (Tiger Bark Press, 2026). In addition, he has published two memoirs: The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, chosen as one of the top five memoirs of 2009 by the Sacramento News and Review and Kissing the Lobster (2018). His poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in nearly two-hundred magazines, including Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Prairie Schooner, and been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, and Best American Horror. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards, have won the Best of the Neil LaBute Festival and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor for Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio.

Peter is a graduate of the University of Denver (Ph.D. 2006), Bennington College (M.F.A. 2003), and the University of Colorado (M.A. 1991). Previously, he taught at California State University in Sacramento and is currently Professor of English at Denison University.

Reviews

[Robin Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Family life, home, children, anger, marriage, tenderness, disgust, inspiration, desire, loss, helplessness, hope. It's all here in the lyrics on the pages.
Dogeared pages:
Had I Loved Better | as mother to a son
Unfinished | as wife to a man, and also - Sometimes I Think I'll Never Leave
At Once the Dawn | as ego