Took House (ARC)

"Lauren Camp's Took House is an astonishing, enchanted world of nature and cityscape, interior terrains, art-making and witnessing all at once. 'That night the sky came up to my lips', she writes, 'It tasted of wind, and gave me something to miss.' The collection is an exploration of nostalgia, how it manifests in literal and metaphorical borderlands, the way we are always transforming and undoing ourselves along with the worlds we inhabit: 'Such endeavor, / all of these seasons'. Towards the end of the collection, she writes, 'I returned empty, without.', with the tenor of someone who understands emptiness is its own kind of abundance. A marvelous collection!"

--Hala Alyan

"In Lauren Camp's Took House we are enveloped in a poetry both precise and mysterious, intimate and sublime. Reading through these poems, I was reminded of the tenet that poetry is not like the interior life, but is the interior life, the thing itself made flesh via language: 'Give me your flowered ear, ' Camp writes in one poem, and in another, 'I will speak / of the seams of desire, the practice / and even the ceiling.' Here is a poet articulating her human existence (the tentacles of love, inebriation, visual art)--here is a particular heart and mind removing its shield in order to commune, to help us see the world again, more deeply and more strangely, and reader, I am grateful."

--Allison White