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A long poem in six sections,
Dream House takes its cue from Gaston Bachelard’s
Poetics of Space in its investigation of female embodiment by calling up such feral, liminal spaces as the pregnant body, the aging mind, snail shells, broom closets, low-ceilinged pubs and abandoned pizza boxes. Part Tardis, part townhouse, part Howl’s moving castle, this wry, surreal and many-peopled narrative interrogates what metaphor might hold of history, both personal and social, in the wake of a mother’s passing. Its migrant speaker trawls through hedgerows and recipe books to unearth stained birdsong and undead civil wars, intent on tracing a matrilineal path across four generations while traversing the haunted margins between existence and belonging.
About the author
Cathy Stonehouse (she/they) is a poet, writer, teacher and visual artist. As a young adult, Cathy migrated from Northern England, where she was born, to Vancouver, BC-the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, where she still lives. She is the author of a novel,
The Causes (Pedlar Press, 2019), a collection of short fiction,
Something About the Animal (Biblioasis, 2011) and two previous collections of poetry,
Grace Shiver (Inanna Publications, 2011) and
The Words I Know (Press Gang, 1994). She also co-edited the anthology
Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008), with Fiona Tinwei Lam and Shannon Cowan. She is a previous editor of
EVENT magazine and currently teaches creative writing and interdisciplinary expressive arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC. Find her online at www.cathystonehouse.com.
Summary
A long poem in six sections, Dream House takes its cue from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space in its investigation of female embodiment by calling up such feral, liminal spaces as the pregnant body, the aging mind, snail shells, broom closets, low-ceilinged pubs and abandoned pizza boxes. Part Tardis, part townhouse, part Howl’s moving castle, this wry, surreal and many-peopled narrative interrogates what metaphor might hold of history, both personal and social, in the wake of a mother’s passing. Its migrant speaker trawls through hedgerows and recipe books to unearth stained birdsong and undead civil wars, intent on tracing a matrilineal path across four generations while traversing the haunted margins between existence and belonging.
