House and Fire (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

"A child is very ill; there is a hospital. . . . The subject is as basic as a bowl and a nail, wood and a house, and a house on fire." —Fanny Howe, from the introductionHouse and Fire is a mother's love song to her stricken young son, written over the years of his hospitalizations for an acute immune disorder. Maria Hummel is a poet of dazzling formal mastery, whose eerie, radiant lyrics and stories evoke the pediatric ward, California life, and the immortal, endangered world of childhood. This unforgettable debut was selected by Fanny Howe.From "House and Fire":for thirty-three yearsI didn't make anythingwith my bodyand thenyour brotherand thenhe sickenedwatching him sleephooked to tubesan empty envelopeinside mefills each dawnwith one long love letterby nightit's mostly apologyA former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Maria Hummel is the author of two novels and poetry and prose in Poetry, Narrative, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. She teaches at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco, California.Fanny Howe has written many books of poetry, and her Selected Poems (UC Press, 2000) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.