By A.V. Christie

The Housing is the co-winner of the 2004 Robert McGovern Publication Prize.

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• "Already the Heart" was featured on Poetry Daily 4/27/2005
• Review in the Philadelphia Inquirer

In A.V. Christie's highly cadenced, diamond-faceted, elliptical poems - emotion intensified to a white heat by its own refinement - to be spare is, equally, to be spared.  Here is the hard-pressed attar of awareness, a distillation of the essential from the usual: "And the garden this time is not about abundance, but the necessary."

- Eleanor Wilner

At a certain point in life we might hear the "whir" of desire, like "the constant thrum of the house" or "the coursing of blood" - a sound that undermines everything, especially our faith in what we thought we knew. This is the moment from which A.V. Christie's powerful and unsettling new collection, The Housing, embarks.  Get ready for the journey.  She offers no "full-moon remedies" but rather the heart's "torments" and its saving "adventures."

- Michael Collier

In beautiful and mysterious poems, many-layered and intricate like the anatomical drawings of Vesalius, A.V. Christie creates the housing for a metaphysical realm pulled back from some far-off dream.  But looking closely, we can see it's our familiar world, exquisitely delineated: the shelter of marriage, family, dwelling, not to forget the body, our first and primary housing.

- Elaine Terranova

About the Author

A.V. Christie, co-winner of the 2004 Robert McGovern Publication Prize, is also the winner of the 1996 National Poetry Series for her book Nine Skies. She has won Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Maryland and Pennsylvania State Arts Councils as well as from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.