House of Jars: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781642510591)

House of Jars weaves together three sequences of poems: the journey of a character called Skeleton Woman through a mental health crisis triggered by menopause and environmental illness, the stories of a pantheon of modernist doctor-writers whose mental health struggles changed their writing, and the Conjuring Moses cycle.

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From the start, House of Jars invites us into a world in which multiple timelines erupt into each other. Sometimes a broken-down old house turns out to be a portal to an underworld, and a spider becomes a guru. The collection centers on the experience of not knowing what is real, of living a long time with a version of reality that is not easy to verify but that occupies a lot of psychic real estate. Personal experience is interwoven with historical research into the lives and challenges of such figures as Gertrude Stein, Ruth Benedict, Rachel Carson, Robert Oppenheimer, and others. Much like Moses, Skeleton Woman spends some time in a wilderness, but hers is hidden inside what looks like an ordinary world. Encountering the weight of collective grief, the omnipresence of magic, the ever-present origin, she comes away with very few certainties.