A Family is a House

by Dustin Pearson

Overview

Poetry. African & African American Studies. "Pearson's debut introduced us to a master transmogrifier. In this surreal, follow-up collection he investigates the architectural implications of inheritance--how the human body houses the violence of its forebears. A FAMILY IS A HOUSE is a blueprint, a guide to the logical structures and spaces we build in our minds: sometimes to keep our secrets in, sometimes to keep the horrors out. Pearson offers us an answer to the toughest question: what happens when our secrets are our horrors? We build, compartmentalize, and quarantine. We refract, reflect, demolish, and burn. This is a book about the oldest partition--that thin wall between the dark and the light. This is a book about bravery, about severing oneself from a lineage of abuse. When the hands that feed us also beat us, we must beat them back with the gifts we've been given. Through Pearson, we relearn that language can be weaponized into a kind of magic that saves us."--Brandon Rushton

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949540017
Publisher:	C&R Press
Publication date:	03/15/2019
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.17(d)

About the Author

Dustin Pearson is the author of MILLENNIAL ROOST (C&R Press, 2018) and A FAMILY IS A HOUSE (C&R Press, 2019). He is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at Florida State University. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Pearson has served as the editor of Hayden's Ferry Review and a Director of the Clemson Literary Festival. He won the Academy of American Poets Katharine C. Turner Prize and holds an MFA from Arizona State University. His work appears in Blackbird, Vinyl Poetry, Bennington Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

7 Pulse

8 II

9 A Subtext for Violence

10 Blood at the Beach

11 The Flame in Mother’s Mouth

12 Paternity

13 The End of Brother’s Tail

16 Beat Sounds

17 Heroes

18 A Palace of Ice

19 III

20 Love, the Ugly

21 The Mound of Dust

22 Renovations

23 Pustule

24 Invincibility

25 Impressed to Follow

26 Falling Out Our Father’s Mouth

27 Barging In

28 Folded Flesh

29 An Occasion of Potted Meat

30 Mateo’s Death

31 The Thawing Season

32 Early That Morning Mom Rallies Her Troupe

33 The Last Time We Saw Our Dad’s Face

34 To the Sons

35 IV

36 Hurts Themselves

37 Where It Can't Be Seen

38 Theo

39 Earl

40 The Wilting Tree

41 Set in Sentiment

42 Family Mentality

43 Dues

44 Diamond Dog

45 Stressful Fits

47 Our Sister Theo

48 V

49 Spectacle

50 Sleeping with Grandfather

51 Autobiography

52 Family Festers

53 In Families

54 Family Feuds

55 Our Father's New Body

56 Hardest Dying

58 Night-groomed

59 The Dreamed Destination

60 The Afterthought

Editorial Reviews

Pearson’s debut introduced us to a master transmogrifier. In this surreal, follow-up collection he investigates the architectural implications of inheritance—how the human body houses the violence of its forebears. A Family Is a House is a blueprint, a guide to the logical structures and spaces we build in our minds: sometimes to keep our secrets in, sometimes to keep the horrors out. Pearson offers us an answer to the toughest question: what happens when our secrets are our horrors? We build, compartmentalize, and quarantine. We refract, reflect, demolish, and burn. This is a book about the oldest partition—that thin wall between the dark and the light. This is a book about bravery, about severing oneself from a lineage of abuse. When the hands that feed us also beat us, we must beat them back with the gifts we’ve been given. Through Pearson, we relearn that language can be weaponized into a kind of magic that saves us.

– Brandon Rushton

In Dustin Pearson’s A Family Is a House we are gifted with a new surreal pantheon dissecting the mythology that arises from family. A brother’s tail that grows uncontrolled across a neighborhood. A mother who becomes a furnace, burning everything in her path. A father who leaves drippings of flesh for his children. In this stunning collection the violence and terror are palpable – we’ve known it in our homes, we know it in our nation. This book is an incredible, visceral experience from one of the most striking and necessary voices in poetry today.

–Glenn Shaheen

From the Publisher