My Crooked House

Cat hoarding. Panic attacks. Rigid perfectionism. Carson reconstructs, through a hybrid of received and invented poetic forms, the literal and metaphorical experience of the psychological homesickness that controlled her life until she confronted it in therapy, and thereby opened herself to making a true home with her second husband.

Teresa Carson holds an MFA in Poetry and an MFA in Theatre, both from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Elegy for the Floater (CavanKerry Press, 2008); My Crooked House (CavanKerry Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Congress of Human Oddities (Deerbrook Editions, 2015). She is a co-founder of the Unbroken Thread[s] Project, which explores how histories/myths/memories are excavated, interpreted, transformed and transmitted. A fairly new resident of Sarasota, Florida, she works to bring poetry to everyone in Sarasota County through her Poetry in Un/Expected Places project, which involves collaborations with artists from all genres.

Carson’s search for a house to call home is a personal quest that becomes epic in the classical sense. 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.
— Jeanne Marie Beaumont

My Crooked House is a compelling, brutally honest book of poems, in which Teresa Carson shares with the reader her long and painful journey from trauma and poverty to self-acceptance and true love. Carson’s private experiences are told with accuracy, irony, and inventiveness. Although many of those experiences are sad, time after time her hopefulness and sense of humor transcend that sadness. Toward the end the reader gets to realize that Carson and her crooked house, which “does not need to be straightened out,” are one.
— Rivka Bekerman-Greenberg, Ph.D.

Welcome to My Crooked House, a collection built of crisp, gritty, sometimes experimental, verse that goes two steps beyond confessional poetry (meant in its best sense, i.e., Plath and Berryman) into a raw unburdening of the soul. These poems are not empty words in search of a truth, they are a revelation of truth, constructed day by day, brick by brick, epoch by epoch. The artistry of these poems doesn’t lessen the hurt of the poet/speaker; it changes it. Combined strains of Jersey working class sensibility, tragic inevitability, sheer guts, and inventive exploration of form and craft create a sturdy foundation for Teresa’s house. Wow!
— Danny Shot

Christopher Bursk confesses that until he was seventeen, he solaced himself by inventing an imaginary companion. The quiet triumph of this book is that he enlists the reader as such a secret sharer. In A Car Stops and a Door Opens, he takes us on a “road trip” that includes his troubled upbringing. On this journey, he explores relationships with honesty and empathy, while disarming us with his rueful, quirky wit: “No one else was willing to be Judas, so I agreed…” Bursk is America’s bard of adolescence.
— Philip Fried, editor Manhattan Review

May 2014
124 pp
Trade paper – 7.5 X 9.25
$18
ISBN 978-1-933880-43-3
LaurelBooks