Nikki Wallschlaeger, Houses

 

Bronze House

Statues in the concession gardens until the beachmaster hippo signaled it was time to move. He needs to learn about his male privilege but I’m actually talking about real hippos here.

This is the most miserable of all the animal prisons because it’s the largest. The barometer of the modern zoo is based on the spike in penguin mass suicides, but these places suck anyway so fuck it.

My father, who left me w/ my mother’s collections. This exacerbates into a goat barnyard in the petting area of the park. Both of them are experts in mannerisms that prevent disclosure. 

She has about 30 cookie jars now, ranging from chicken little to baseball tart. Someday I will have to sort them. I will do something strange to pay homage to what we couldn’t bridge. I will bring the pieces of

ceramic cows and giraffes and rearrange them into a pentagram on the sidewalk. As a teenager I refused to come home one night and got drunk, had sex, and passed out. The next day I was sentenced to 2 days

in the county mental health facility. When you picked me up, you didn’t say a word. So the first shared, a piece of a bear nose, goes here

I haven’t seen most of Wisconsin-based poet Nikki Wallschlaeger’s published collections, having caught only her third full-length title, Waterbaby (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], so it is interesting to finally see a copy of her full-length debut, Houses (Grand Rapids MI: Horse Less Press, 2015). The author of four full-length collections—the other two being Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017) and HOLD YOUR OWN (Copper Canyon Press, 2024)—the poems in Houses hint at a foundation as a nesting book, but is far more complex, complicated. Composed as forty-six prose poems, each piece is titled as a separate house—“Little House,” “Silver House,” “Linen White House,” “Cranberry House,” etcetera—that each shape around and through a particular idea, commentary or thought; a foundation from which to begin a larger conversation on home and privilege, culture and class. “As a westerner,” begins “Yellow House,” “I will only paint thinking about Matisse. As a westerner, your poverty is romantic. As a westerner, overpopulation is the cause and not the effect. As a westerner, legwork is a numb strut.”

Edited/published by Jen Tynes, I keep telling myself that I’ve hardly seen any books or chapbooks by Horse Less Press, but a quick search through my archives finds reviews of Stephanie Anderson’s Lands of Yield (2018) [see my review of such here], Anna Gurton-Wachter’s Blank Blank Blues (2016) [see my review of such here], Kate Schapira’s Handbook For Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out (2016) [see my review of such here], Anne Cecelia Holmes’ The Jitters (2015) [see my review of such here], Pattie McCarthy’s Nulls (2014) [see my review of such here], Kate Schapira's The Soft Place (2012) [see my review of such here], Rebecca Loudon’s TRISM (2012) [see my review of such here], Norma Cole’s Coleman Hawkins Ornette Coleman (2012) [see my review of such here] and Richard Froude’s Fabric (2011) [see my review of such here], so I’ve clearly been catching more than I’d realized, although I had not caught this.

It is interesting, that if her third collection was self-described as a collection “about Blackness, language, and motherhood in America; about the ancestral joys and sharp pains that travel together through the nervous system’s crowded riverways; about the holy sanctuary of the bathtub for a spirit that’s pushed beyond exhaustion,” then the bones of such articulations clearly sit in the poems that make up Houses. Her lyric suite of houses, beautifully and sharply composed, accumulatively write on the promise and the failures of home and community, and how the past seeps in. “Our night sweats bring active listening to the community,” Wallschlaeger writes, as part of “Silver House,” “the community who sleeps so the city becomes what we don’t recollect so we call it death. This is poor dream autophony when everything is about rent // death is not everything. It’s not the moon.”