The house is still standing is peopled with charlatans, gingerbread men, children, and savants — the thousands and the particular. Adrienne Bartlett builds this nimble first collection with a supple craft. The poems deke and swerve, from the wry to the theatrical to the intimate. Whether riffing on the secret identities of public intellectuals and pop icons or penning elegiac verse, Barrett's voice is strong, anchored, inviting. Although she takes her readers through both "substance / and its downfall," in the end, the structure is sound, she is holding up.

Adrienne Barrett is a writer and bricklayer. A graduate of Trent University and the University of British Columbia, she has seen her poetry published in Arc, Prairie Fire, and the Fiddlehead. Her work has also appeared on the longlist for the 2011 Montreal Prize. Born in Hamilton, she kicked around Peterborough, Vancouver, and Toronto before settling in Woodstock, Ontario.

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"Adrienne Barrett's curiosity leads her in many directions: unsteady truths, lives of eccentric others, childhood experience that can mar or determine, or shift forward — as memory — into adulthood. With imagery that is at times intense, at times ferocious and humorous, Barrett refuses to look away or turn aside. This is the observant self, probing."

Frances Itani

"With exhilarating shifts in perception and a casually eccentric diction that, like a Fred Astaire dance, is 'ever so slightly off time,' Adrienne Barrett's poems reveal that reality is a good deal weirder and more complicated than we might care to admit. At any second, the everyday might explode in a "Little Hiroshima" of tragedy or wonder. 'There's terror in it' and moments of grace, too — what we used to call the sublime.This is poetry that 'rolls without warning.' The house is still standing announces that a fully formed and authentic talent has arrived."

Steve McOrmond