Moving House

Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's Moving House is a book of dark, defiant memory: "We lived and died by stories in that house." These spare, taut poems evoke their stories with powerful economy.
Grouping the poems in seven sections, she leads us from childhood devastation and desolation through poetic songs celebrating saints of the church and the saintliness of artists--along with the homelier saintliness of family, friends, and community--arriving finally at a less constricted realm in which possibility and autonomy play a salvific role. The book's journey is, indeed, one of "moving house" from a dark to a brighter place--though one might also read the title as an epithet for the world, which is, itself, a moving house.