Little Houses (Athena Nassar)

 “In her prolific debut, Athena Nassar transports her readers with poems that evolve like vividly kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, each one rich in risk and feeling, music and metaphor. In Little Houses, people ‘sit like crescent moons / dropped from the sky,’ light pours from the sun ‘like a runny egg,’ ‘the aroma of apricots hangs / in the air like fresh linens,’ tongues can transform into eels, a dead goat’s eyes into halved peaches, the self into ‘a housefly floating in a cold glass of milk.’ Tangible, sensual, surreal, Nassar’s poems are at once vitally in touch with our seething American moment and mindful of the vital commerce between personal and cultural history. ‘I am a lover of all things defiant in nature,’ Nassar declares, which is the credo that also marks this poet as one of the avareh, one ‘of the longing souls.’”

—Daniel Tobin, author of Blood Labors