"This heartbreaking and robust poetry collection . . . explores the complexity of the mind in the midst of grief" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).
These are poems of absence. Written in the wake of the loss of her mother, River House follows Sally Keith as she makes her way through the depths of grief, navigating a world newly transfigured.
Incorporating her travels abroad, her experience studying the neutral mask technique developed by Jacques Lecoq, and her return to the river house she and her mother often visited, the poet assembles a guide to survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable pain. Even in the dark, Keith finds the ways we can be "filled with this unexpected feeling of living."
Industry Reviews
"No poet of her generation braids passion with intellect more impressively than Sally Keith. And in River House, Keith carries her talent to a whole new level. An elegy for the poet’s mother, River House is also an investigation of how we give our lives meaning and shape. At turns gorgeous, wry, and heartbreaking, these poems render the individual soul with a disarming immediacy. To read Sally Keith’s River House is to feel grief and bewilderment verging into sheer wonder."
—Peter Campion
"River because we are moving inexorably forward; house because we are locked forever to the past. Preternaturally calm even as they twist and turn against themselves, the sixty-three poems of River House feel as if they’re happening in the time it takes to read them, except that when you’re finished with River House, your dream comes true: you can read the poems again. I do not know of a book of poems that embodies more heartbreakingly or more intelligently the experience of irreconcilable loss."
—James Longenbach
“'What kind of metamorphosis is death: beautiful or utilitarian?' What the mourner learns about the end of the world is that you have to keep on living. We learn by doing; River House is a book of spiritual exercises that seem at first to require no belief but attention. Only at the end of Sally Keith’s extraordinary collection do we realize what’s here to be believed in isn’t experience, but beauty itself, the human work of reading and looking and loving, anything that stops in our tracks, anything that asks us to rush to its side. The poems focus the reader with a hunger so intelligent , so real, and so immediate, you forget you’re reading a poem, and simply remember there’s something vital you must do. It’s like looking at the moon while watching the stars disappear: don’t you look harder? These poems are clear and strange. They illuminate without consolation. The world has ended many times in our contemporary literary landscape, but rarely has it started over with such agility, economy and elegance."
—Katie Peterson
"Heartbreaking and robust . . . Keith's poems possess a quiet music, and their intricate scatters of thought bear witness to the intimate struggles of mourning."—Publishers Weekly STARRED Review
