Description
Book SynopsisA house echoes with the footfalls of wild men running behind the walls in S. Whitney Holmes’s debut collection,
Room Where I Get What I Want. Here in the house that is not a house, Holmes destabilizes the architectural structure by relishing in the details: a German man builds a mnemonic castle, a hero swallows a tulip bulb, and a woman opens a book to place in its hollowed center a gun. Debating space and intimacy, power and pleasure, Holmes constructs a spellbinding education as erotically charged as it is dangerous.
Trade Review“S. Whitney Holmes uses anaphora in ways that would make Ginsberg marvel and sigh. These poems repeat words and phrases as a shaman might if chanting to make a prayer heard in the supernatural realm. Holmes isn’t interested in the supernatural though. Instead, this poet wants to know if these incantations can lead to something physical, something made from the brick and mortar of words, or as Holmes would say: ‘The built house, unbuilds itself.’ This is a thrilling debut.” —Jericho Brown
“Defiant and defenseless, seductive and cool, hyper-attentive and wishing for oblivion, these poems vibrate with a compressed ambivalence—‘You have trouble telling when I am sincere / but you are not alone’—always about to explode. ‘I build a house. / Can you live in it?’ The danger is manifest, but who could resist?” —Joel Brouwer
