The Making of a house

Most people think a poetry collection is something you move through in a straight line. Page one. Page two. Beginning to end. But The House That Eats Its Daughters was not built to be traveled that way.

It is a structure, not a path.

Every reader enters through a different room. Some begin in girlhood. Some fall first into inheritance. Some open the book and immediately find the door.

What you recognize determines where you start.

This book was shaped intentionally like a place rather than a story because that is how memory works. You do not remember in sequence. You remember in space. You return without warning. You avoid without deciding. You get lost inside something you swore you escaped.

When you open this book, you are not being told a narrative. You are being allowed to wander a ruin that is still standing.

You are not a visitor. You are a witness.

If you’re here, the threshold has already opened.

-JN