Our House Was on Fire

Poetry. "'I think yes. I say no,' Laura Van Prooyen declares in this book of assertions and questions where danger lives at every turn—a child threatened by disease, a love passing through uncertainty, all the what ifs and keep at it of our days on the planet. Like music, these meticulously paced poems play over and over unto dark trance their observation and grief, again and again the natural world furious and spare until all seems to stand still. 'Understand, the plot doesn't matter,' this highly lyric poet insists because her staring stops time. 'I felt bad for looking,' she tells us. 'Still, I looked.'"—Marianne Boruch