House and Fire

"A child is very ill; there is a hospital. . . . The subject is as basic as a bowl and a nail, wood and a house, and a house on fire." —Fanny Howe, from the introduction

House and Fire is a mother's love song to her stricken young son, written over the years of his hospitalizations for an acute immune disorder. Maria Hummel is a poet of dazzling formal mastery, whose eerie, radiant lyrics and stories evoke the pediatric ward, California life, and the immortal, endangered world of childhood. ...