House of Sugar, House of Stone - Mountain West Poetry Series Book | Contemporary American Poetry Collection | Perfect for Poetry Lovers & Book Club Discussions

In her latest book, Pérez populates her narrative arc with a mix of characters from Grimm’s tales as well as her own experience as a wife and mother, taking on personas to explore the wellsprings of joy and acceptance, abandonment, struggle, and mortality. In her exquisite musical lines, sometimes reminiscent of e. e. cummings, she paints indelible portraits of the the landscapes of these character’s souls.In “Carrying On”, a portrait of someone contemplating the wreck of their days, we read: …’half the bitter twilight/hung coat-like in my closet. Come here/said the dark…’. In “A New Mother Discovers Emptiness”, the speaker (the mother in Hansel and Gretel who faces such hard choices) we hear: ‘In each other’s faces we reflected want,/so I sought solace on my own./I found it first in the darkness of the woods,/which rendered me invisible.’Several poems are studies in dangers barely hinted at, somehow looming under the surface, ready to emerge. In “Under the Roof”, the lines trip along the tongue like a nursery rhyme’s, but the subtext is much darker: ‘frost clicking as pine needles ever/fall and flow, those slivered, silvered/spines of sap, sweet poison tipped,/designed to stick…’The lightest touches come when contemplating a young child. In “Little Song” we hear: ‘…this shotgun riding hitchhiker/on swiftly shifting tilting lifting track/for blooming trains’. In “Nose Tip”, an ode to a child yet unborn: ‘your moon skull/floats tall on the tides/it calls’.A recurring theme is motherhood, with its joys, fears, ambivalence, and here Ms. Pérez is absolutely fearless in painting the full spectrum of emotion. All in all, House of Sugar, House of Stone is a sobering, bracing examination of worlds whose Disney sugarcoat has been stripped away, allowing the reader to see deeply into the underlying forces at work that shape personality and character. Highly recommended.