House of Deer

Like the Oppen she takes as her epigraph, Sasha Steensen’s is a poetry that feels magically made via both subtraction and building. With language as lush as Hopkins’ and then as small and weird as Niedecker’s, Steensen tells a story, or alights in and out of a story, all her own. It’s an American story, too, with all the bloodiness and experiment that such a thing requires.–Maggie Nelson

Sasha Steensen’s third volume is a lyric inquiry into a personal history of the back-to-the-land idealism of the 1970s, with its promises and failings, naturalism gone awry, and journeys into the worlds of addiction, recovery, and, ultimately, family. If family is a body, learn its anatomy, Steensen writes early in the book, immediately before upending all our expectations and giving us new thoughts to think.

The family bought a rural plot & planted a garden.

The family formed thoughts.

Within these thoughts, eggs hatched, animals were born, little wars formed. Each thought said unspeakable things to the other thoughts.

As you know, unspoken thoughts rot.

Sasha Steensen teaches poetry workshops, literature courses, letterpress printing, and bookmaking at Colorado State University. She is the author of The Method (2008) and A Magic Book (Alberta Prize, 2004), and chapbooks including A History of the Human Family (2010), The Future of an Illusion (2008), and correspondence (with Gordon Hadfield, 2004). Steensen is also co-editor of Bonfire Press, and she serves as one of the poetry editors for Colorado Review.