Housebreak

Shareen K Murayama's debut collection, Housebreak is a book of wild beauty and probing enquiry. Murayama asks how we live within perennial emergency, where belonging and self-protection converge, how we explain loss to children, what the wind has in common with hate crime. These heartbreaking poems are full of dance-like grace, and gut punches that send the reader off balance. Formally artful and disruptive, they seek out the breaths between words and worlds, applying biology, etymology, astronautics and myth. There is a gentle undoing, a quiet rage here, alongside great tenderness. Housebreak is stunning, apocalyptic, revelatory.