My Crooked House
by Teresa Carson
Foreword by Randy Frost, Ph.D.
House and home, with all their literal and figurative meanings, are the central tropes in Teresa Carson’s intensely candid second book of poems, MY CROOKED HOUSE (CavanKerry Press; May 2014; $18.00, paperback). Part of CavanKerry’s Laurel Books imprint, which explores the many poignant issues associated with confronting serious physical and/or psychological illness, Carson’s autobiographical collection probes the poet’s journey from metaphorical homelessness to homesickness to homecoming. From a fractured childhood as the youngest of ten children in a large New Jersey blue-collar family, through years of emotional isolation and perceived marginalization, to a later-in-life discovery of self, Carson chronicles a particular story that is nonetheless far-reaching in its struggles, fears, and small victories.
“These poems weave a tapestry of several lives, the life of a house, the life of a family, and the life of a poet,” writes Randy Frost, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Smith College and co-author of Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. “They also offer a template for resilience following a lifetime of suffering at the hands of a dysfunctional family and a destructive and manipulative psychiatrist. The author’s house does not become a home until she does the thing she cannot bear. She must experience the pain she has avoided for so long. This lesson is clear for the rest of her life as well. She must embrace the fear to conquer her panic. She must relish in uncertainty to surmount her perfectionism….Bad things happen, but these poems are good things.”
From the ashes of a childhood spent with a mentally-ill mother and a much loved father who frequently abandoned the family, Carson crafts poems of dark beauty and incessant yearning, inventing poetic forms as she turns the literal into the metaphorical. Academic failures, despite intelligence, and years of “settling” for a life and career that are beneath her once golden aspirations, are refracted through a story that finds her living a semi-reclusive life, surrounded by dozens of homeless cats. As she suffers from panic attacks and ignores the ring of the doorbell, her deteriorating house becomes a symbol of her own declining place in the world. Only finally through therapy and the understanding grace of her second husband does she begin to repair the structure she lives in—both her hundred-year-old house and her own wounded psyche:
Nobody else, I think
while roaming your top floor
in darkness, can do this.
Nobody else, I think
while up and down your flight
in darkness, can do this.
Nobody else, I think
while roaming your first floor
in darkness, can do this.
I know you well enough
to walk around what’s solid.
I know you well enough
to walk into what’s shadow.
House, I know you like a book.
“To My House”
“Carson’s search for a house to call home is a personal quest that becomes epic in the classical sense,” says Jeanne Marie Beaumont. “Beginning with calamity, MY CROOKED HOUSE circles back to origins, then passes through several harrowing perils and challenges on its way toward a more stable, if not perfectly straightened, present. It’s a house full of frank confession, brave excavation, obsessive lists, and hard reckonings. That the individual life, honest and recounted and accounted for, can be so thrillingly spun into gold is only the latest of this poet’s heroic triumphs.”
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About Teresa Carson
Teresa Carson, poet and playwright, holds an MFA in Poetry and an MFA in Theatre, both from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the assistant director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and associate publisher at CavanKerry Press. She continues to live in the crooked house in Union City, NJ, with her husband, John.
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