A meditation on the wiles of depression, illuminated by queer and diasporic experience.

"We, nosotros, nosotras: somos sobrevivientes." Weaving prose poetry, essay, autobiography and photography in mutual contamination, Nicholas Dawson relates his own deep depression, a state never fully gone, always cohabitant. Amidst this persistence, "the body and the pen bring a plural syntax of alternative knowledges into being, one which allows us to know the world better, to know ourselves better, to better love daybreak and this sun obstinately piercing the curtain with its brazen rays."

House Within a House, in a luminous translation by David Bradford, tells the story of what walls the depressed person in, what keeps them wandering inside, and what finally gets them, somehow, out of the house. The original book, Désormais, ma demeure, received the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal.

Nicholas Dawson's profile page

David Bradford is a poet, editor and organizer based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). He is the author of several chapbooks, including Nell Zink is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Capilano Review, Tiny Mag, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and is a founding editor of House House Press. Dream of No One but Myself is his first book.

David Bradford's profile page

"The searching, confessional, and deeply intelligent voice of House Within a House is a flashlight beam that takes the reader into and through the territory of a depression — but this light lingers, so that at the book's close we are left with the glow of language naming the overlooked, blinking at its cumulative power." — Sadiqa de Meijer

"Nicholas Dawson's House Within a House is about the creative process and all the anguish and hard-fought joy that surrounds it. This book, which so expertly employs philosophical, memoiristic, and visual modes, is deeply human; it seeks to affirm in all of us the part of our personhood that waits for us 'on the other side of depression' — a task as urgent as any in our current moment. This book will mean a lot to a whole range of readers." — Billy-Ray Belcourt