Poems exploring the idea of home and the difficulties of a deeply ambiguous relationship to that word.

At once wise and achingly at a loss, Ann Scowcroft's The Truth of Houses is an elegant and honest debut collection. While very intimate — even startlingly intimate at times — the voices of these poems are constantly taking a step backward, wrestling for a measure of distance and perspective. Reading them, we eavesdrop on the uncovering of a personal vernacular that might allow the present to be better lived; we have the sense of overhearing a particular yet eerily familiar inner struggle — a struggle for insight, for an equanimity with which both narrator and fortunate reader might re-enter life anew.

All of which is to say: the houses aren't fooled
the houses know the five truths

The truth of light: you will see before you understand
The truth of motion: escape is an illusion
The truth of trees: your busy life will dissolve into the soil
The truth of windows: what protects can also maim

The truth of peace:
despite all the other truths
knowing will come to you wearing one hundred faces
contain you as once you contained your
own blood

— from "The Truth of Houses"

Ann Scowcroft has been a professional writer and editor for many years, and was an academic for a few. She has a PhD in Applied Linguistics and presently works in the field of humanitarian assistance. Quebec is home base. The Truth of Houses is her first book.

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