— library · bk · 07

chapbook · stitched, brown paper · pamphlet shelf

poems for an unfinished house

poems for an unfinished house

a. corvin · small bay editions · stitched, twenty-four pages

eighteen poems, all written in a house the poet did not finish building. plaster on three walls; the fourth left as brickwork for the duration. the poems address that fourth wall directly. the poet writes to it as one writes to a long absence — patient, without reproach.

the second sequence concerns rooms the poet did not get to: the corridor never tiled, the small pantry never put in. she lists them. she addresses them. she thanks them, in the last poem, for not being finished, for remaining the kind of rooms a poem can still enter and rearrange.

the book is twenty-four pages, stitched at the spine in linen thread. an errata slip, tipped in, reads only: every poem is wrong on purpose; please correct it as you read. the slip is signed. the same press printed essays in dim light and the small chapbook on ritual objects.

marginalia · pencil, between two poems she made me wait three years for the kitchen. i made her wait two for the answer. we counted, in the end, even.

atlas · return