What do you think?
Rate this book
Bone House
Bone House is the second collection of poems by Scott Laudati.
Topics include celebrity, love, dogs, New York City, youth, drugs and faith.
Topics include celebrity, love, dogs, New York City, youth, drugs and faith.
- GenresPoetry
118 pages, Paperback
Published March 11, 2018
20 people want to read
About the author
Scott Laudati
22 books63 followersScott Laudati lives in NYC with his boxer, Satine. He is the author of Bone House, Play The Devil, CAMP WINAPOOKA, and Hawaiian Shirts In The Electric Chair. His poetry and essays have been published by Columbia University, X-R-A-Y, Litro Magazine, New Pop Lit, The Bitter Oleander, Fjords Review, The Stockholm Review, The Adirondack Review, and many others. Visit him anywhere @scottlaudati
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 2, 2018
I love the surprise in Scott Laudati's poetry, his writing often takes you somewhere completely unexpected, it's refreshing to experience. These poems are beautifully written, melancholic yet sharp bites of life - the messy fucked up things that haunt us as we grow up, the world's ugliness. Distinct work, I highly recommend this book.
March 29, 2018
After reading Laudati’s first book of poetry, Hawaiian Shirts in the Electric Chair (pick it up, it’s excellent), I was amped to grab a copy of his new book. It did not disappoint.
His prose is beautiful and relatable. He perfectly and often humorously captures life in NYC and the suburbs, and more importantly, the people here. He speaks movingly about America, its heart, its dreams, its failures. He writes poignantly of youth, hopes and dreams, and love—but even more so of failure, loss, and disillusionment.
This book can be easily read in one sitting, but there are some lines that you will (deservedly) read again and again.
His prose is beautiful and relatable. He perfectly and often humorously captures life in NYC and the suburbs, and more importantly, the people here. He speaks movingly about America, its heart, its dreams, its failures. He writes poignantly of youth, hopes and dreams, and love—but even more so of failure, loss, and disillusionment.
This book can be easily read in one sitting, but there are some lines that you will (deservedly) read again and again.
May 7, 2018
‘Bone House,’ the Light in a Broken Alley.
Scott Laudati: Bone House
Bone Machine Books, United States of America, 2018
ISBN: 0692056513, pp. 118, $3.90 on Kindle, $7.00 on Paperback (Amazon).
Instagram: @scottlaudati
This collection contains references to drug use, alcohol, mental illness, self-harm and suicide.
When the world has constantly been exposed to the likes of Instagram poets, it can be incredibly difficult to find poignant writing that delivers something else, a level of almost distress, tinged with the encouragement to live out your life as best you can. Scott Laudati’s second poetry collection Bone House, comprises of a collection of realisations about love, faith, politics and life itself in the twenty-first century that are uncomfortable to read.
“sometimes I think we are flowers…
waiting to be ripped apart in the endless storm” (66).
Before you read through the collection, you’re met with a very arthouse cover, grungy and experimental. The cover reflects the writing to the most part, but doesn’t even begin to express the emotion within. I felt hazardous in continuing reading a few sections, the writing becoming overwhelming as it tangled itself in my anxiety.
But Laudati writes smoothly. Utilizing a lowercase system with minimal grammar, he engages with the core of the words, the sentences that make up each of the poems within the collection. I was surprised, noting that the poems were longer in length than many popular poems these days. I felt that the dragging out of the poems across many pages enabled their influence to be prolonged. Ravenous for more understanding and depth, you keep at the collection.
“all the poems in the world won’t buy you
a convertible” i said. “I don’t know
how many times
i have to learn that lesson
before i stop trying.” (59-60)
The collection explores life as a poet, as a writer, an artist. Acknowledging the challenges in creative endeavours, Laudati urges his readers to experience life itself. To be more than just what their life’s script, but to challenge it and “make sure/your accomplishments/are yours. the failures as well/ those will always/be more important” (48). This left me personally with a level of existentialism that I’m still shaking off as I write this review. For a reader to really identify with Laudati, they should be able to adapt to the experiences of others, and consider demographics beyond their own as Laudati does.
Beyond the hardships, there’s a level of softness, beckoning at readers to realise that life does not always operate with the light on. Accepting your failures and experiencing the world, is the best way to live. To suffer, to know and breathe. Small pockets of peace are present throughout the collection and remind the readers amongst a variety of self-help tools, to ground themselves.
“if your mom still loves you
after all your shit,
let her hug you.” (101)
Laudati encourages his readers to think about their unaltered identities. In pulling one’s self apart and putting it back together, a person may develop a stronger understanding of who they are. Through a series of harsh and melancholic lines, Laudati has composed a collection that at first I wasn’t sure I would find familiarity in. But as it continues, the reader can find the poems getting stronger and more visceral. Scott Laudati is current and unafraid to speak his truths in a painful and progressing world.
This book was provided to Farrago by Scott Laudati.
Scott Laudati: Bone House
Bone Machine Books, United States of America, 2018
ISBN: 0692056513, pp. 118, $3.90 on Kindle, $7.00 on Paperback (Amazon).
Instagram: @scottlaudati
This collection contains references to drug use, alcohol, mental illness, self-harm and suicide.
When the world has constantly been exposed to the likes of Instagram poets, it can be incredibly difficult to find poignant writing that delivers something else, a level of almost distress, tinged with the encouragement to live out your life as best you can. Scott Laudati’s second poetry collection Bone House, comprises of a collection of realisations about love, faith, politics and life itself in the twenty-first century that are uncomfortable to read.
“sometimes I think we are flowers…
waiting to be ripped apart in the endless storm” (66).
Before you read through the collection, you’re met with a very arthouse cover, grungy and experimental. The cover reflects the writing to the most part, but doesn’t even begin to express the emotion within. I felt hazardous in continuing reading a few sections, the writing becoming overwhelming as it tangled itself in my anxiety.
But Laudati writes smoothly. Utilizing a lowercase system with minimal grammar, he engages with the core of the words, the sentences that make up each of the poems within the collection. I was surprised, noting that the poems were longer in length than many popular poems these days. I felt that the dragging out of the poems across many pages enabled their influence to be prolonged. Ravenous for more understanding and depth, you keep at the collection.
“all the poems in the world won’t buy you
a convertible” i said. “I don’t know
how many times
i have to learn that lesson
before i stop trying.” (59-60)
The collection explores life as a poet, as a writer, an artist. Acknowledging the challenges in creative endeavours, Laudati urges his readers to experience life itself. To be more than just what their life’s script, but to challenge it and “make sure/your accomplishments/are yours. the failures as well/ those will always/be more important” (48). This left me personally with a level of existentialism that I’m still shaking off as I write this review. For a reader to really identify with Laudati, they should be able to adapt to the experiences of others, and consider demographics beyond their own as Laudati does.
Beyond the hardships, there’s a level of softness, beckoning at readers to realise that life does not always operate with the light on. Accepting your failures and experiencing the world, is the best way to live. To suffer, to know and breathe. Small pockets of peace are present throughout the collection and remind the readers amongst a variety of self-help tools, to ground themselves.
“if your mom still loves you
after all your shit,
let her hug you.” (101)
Laudati encourages his readers to think about their unaltered identities. In pulling one’s self apart and putting it back together, a person may develop a stronger understanding of who they are. Through a series of harsh and melancholic lines, Laudati has composed a collection that at first I wasn’t sure I would find familiarity in. But as it continues, the reader can find the poems getting stronger and more visceral. Scott Laudati is current and unafraid to speak his truths in a painful and progressing world.
This book was provided to Farrago by Scott Laudati.
August 10, 2023
This Rocket Pop-colored chapbook houses free-falling typewriters, chicks long gone, punky sorrow and conspiracy radio, some dark humor about boofing trumpets and romanticizing slacker strangers. Subway vagrants who wanna char fanny-pack fatties and dope-sick toy-stealers. The funny anticlimactic weed-smoking and bowling after a brush with death. Ants dodging the laser beam of magnifying glasses. Telling frogs to die. Moon minnows circling dreams. Good girls w/ skinned knees and old softball helmets. The suburban rite of passage to whine and scrap and steal K-pins. White in-fighting, black moods. NYC to NJ, nothing but roaches. Hollywood Rain. “She’s Not Coming Back” sad boi hours that still hit like cactus prickles. Nobody gives you more bang for your buck than this man; if you buy direct, you even get these cool inky woodcuts of alien pyramids or pristine letters he makes tons of.
This chapbook, fatter than most, starts sadder & more personal than I suspected, still dotted w/ cuteness: a young couple with tiffs and joys like chasing an escaped cat or perusing turtle tanks at a New Jersey zoo before imminent heartbreak. The next poems are of a more expected flavor: graveyard shift dudes walking midnight streets and young man runaway prose that could be cigarette ash-speckled Green Day lyrics. The street sounds are such a signature cacophony in Scott’s work. Hopeless jottings and hopeful jags. There’s a sweet, ironic poem about working as a bossed-around bellhop that reads more like a story. It’s about buying coke for an interested actress. I love the way this book is set up: no typical tiny-font poetry, the words bleed—not just to fit into a page count or clever but frivolous shape like a worm-bitten apple. I like, for all the self-pitying of his adolescence and early adulthood, there’s the admission of doing shitty things to people (pranks to fights to betrayals) and not always passing the buck on your failures and stagnation. The vulnerability on both sides of “I Didn’t Mean It.”
For his next feat, I hope he writes more extensively on the blue milk prisons and piss-drenched train stations. The unwarranted but universal guilt of showing a friend fun and then turning it into a death sentence. How the people dress and move, their features and recurring sayings. The quirk diversity of his Play The Devil dudes (though his food fight chase w/ a Joe La in After High School does sound like a mixed around version of the burger-flinging scene at Home Depot). More on what he thinks of the phrase love for money. From the cover, I kind of expected more rockstar or embarrassingly faded glam guys, Sound Garden music vid-type psychedelia, funny Staten Island schlubs. I hope he remembers to feed his mom’s fish and keep on trucking. 🚛 (Four stars cuz ppl get too skeptical of dozens of five star reviews, and I’m telling you there’s talent)
This chapbook, fatter than most, starts sadder & more personal than I suspected, still dotted w/ cuteness: a young couple with tiffs and joys like chasing an escaped cat or perusing turtle tanks at a New Jersey zoo before imminent heartbreak. The next poems are of a more expected flavor: graveyard shift dudes walking midnight streets and young man runaway prose that could be cigarette ash-speckled Green Day lyrics. The street sounds are such a signature cacophony in Scott’s work. Hopeless jottings and hopeful jags. There’s a sweet, ironic poem about working as a bossed-around bellhop that reads more like a story. It’s about buying coke for an interested actress. I love the way this book is set up: no typical tiny-font poetry, the words bleed—not just to fit into a page count or clever but frivolous shape like a worm-bitten apple. I like, for all the self-pitying of his adolescence and early adulthood, there’s the admission of doing shitty things to people (pranks to fights to betrayals) and not always passing the buck on your failures and stagnation. The vulnerability on both sides of “I Didn’t Mean It.”
For his next feat, I hope he writes more extensively on the blue milk prisons and piss-drenched train stations. The unwarranted but universal guilt of showing a friend fun and then turning it into a death sentence. How the people dress and move, their features and recurring sayings. The quirk diversity of his Play The Devil dudes (though his food fight chase w/ a Joe La in After High School does sound like a mixed around version of the burger-flinging scene at Home Depot). More on what he thinks of the phrase love for money. From the cover, I kind of expected more rockstar or embarrassingly faded glam guys, Sound Garden music vid-type psychedelia, funny Staten Island schlubs. I hope he remembers to feed his mom’s fish and keep on trucking. 🚛 (Four stars cuz ppl get too skeptical of dozens of five star reviews, and I’m telling you there’s talent)
April 28, 2018
Scott Laudati's recent collection 'BONE HOUSE' is a melancholic journey through the poet's memories of people, places, and events which have cast an impression on his psyche. Unlike the upbeat, Kerouac-esque 'Hawaiian Shirts in the Electric Chair', this collection is an exploration through darker, more internal landscapes. Laudati masterfully crafts these experiences and reflections, gleaning insights from moments of despair; lovers lost, family lost, innocence lost, and a lost-time in his collective experiences. Individually, and as a collection, these poems aim inward; they are brutally personal and reveal taut introspection. The poems are part confessional, (likely) part therapeutic, part regretful, with a few thrown in to soften the mood. No pretense here, as Laudati is not the hero of these poems; no posturing, no overtly political commentary (although there are a few subtle hints). Avoiding cliches many poets use, Laudati has crafted a uniquely voiced collection of excellent poems.
April 19, 2018
Love this new collection from Scott Laudati he does a great job with imagery and it's like a narrator is telling a story in each poem. The reader feels like an outside observer but also on a strange journey of places and emotions others might be afraid to go. My favorites are 'Buffalo Bones' and 'Leave Me Alone' but they are all great. Laudati is a poet who lives and knows the harsh beautiful reality of NYC and nobody is better today at bring that to life. Buy this book today!
January 14, 2019
Retelling What Was and Will Be
Scott and I met at a Belmar reading last August and needless to say, he’s an awesome dude. Talks and walks like a seasoned writer, and expresses those traits even more so on the pages that he bleeds on. Bone House, to me, serves like the recounted memories of a man who’s been many a place at many a time, learned plenty from all of the intertwined experiences, and admits to still being a student and observer of this lightly darkened crux of the galaxy. The poems themselves tear you to pieces, then offer up a sewing kit to help close the wounds. Hawaiian Shirts and Bone House are by far two of my favorite poetry collections and I am excited beyond prose-laden belief to see what comes down the pike next from this talented wordsman.
Scott and I met at a Belmar reading last August and needless to say, he’s an awesome dude. Talks and walks like a seasoned writer, and expresses those traits even more so on the pages that he bleeds on. Bone House, to me, serves like the recounted memories of a man who’s been many a place at many a time, learned plenty from all of the intertwined experiences, and admits to still being a student and observer of this lightly darkened crux of the galaxy. The poems themselves tear you to pieces, then offer up a sewing kit to help close the wounds. Hawaiian Shirts and Bone House are by far two of my favorite poetry collections and I am excited beyond prose-laden belief to see what comes down the pike next from this talented wordsman.
August 12, 2018
"we were giants once
and the world
was small"
What a beautiful book. Read this for the cold grey mornings, for the hangovers, for the breakups and closing shifts and all the quiet tough conversations of the past. Read it to feel something real and visceral and melancholy and maybe a little hopeful. Laudati perfectly captures what it is to be young but not so young, to be restless and idealistic, to be of a generation in a world not made for it.
Bone House is sure to strike a nerve in everyone, but for this 20-something New York girl, it was hard not to feel like these poems were written just for me.
and the world
was small"
What a beautiful book. Read this for the cold grey mornings, for the hangovers, for the breakups and closing shifts and all the quiet tough conversations of the past. Read it to feel something real and visceral and melancholy and maybe a little hopeful. Laudati perfectly captures what it is to be young but not so young, to be restless and idealistic, to be of a generation in a world not made for it.
Bone House is sure to strike a nerve in everyone, but for this 20-something New York girl, it was hard not to feel like these poems were written just for me.
November 18, 2019
A mature second act from Laudati. He says away from personal relationships about girls in this one and starts going deeper. What is it about his city that draws him in? Keeps him up at night? He paints a picture of a world that doesn't want him but he is clawing his way through anyway.
November 15, 2025
Borrowed this book from my sister. Glad she discovered it because I really enjoyed this one. There were so many lines that I loved and reread multiple times. One example:And it makes you exhausted/ but it never makes you fall asleep.
Highly recommend. I plan on reading more from the author.
Highly recommend. I plan on reading more from the author.
December 4, 2019
Oh yea a wonderful read about living in new york city. Makes me want to get on the bus and go back there. Love these poems!
October 7, 2023
I'm obsessed with The Poem. The rest is pretty good too.
May 4, 2024
this book put my heart in a slicing machine
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews