The Occupant is a collection of persona and prose poems that explores the "inner lives" of common household objects, along with that of "The Occupant" of the house, their human keeper. Taken together, their shifting perspectives engage questions of time, mortality, and the nature of consciousness itself, reminding readers of the beauty and strangeness that lurk under the surface of ordinary thought-the "other world" that, as Paul Éluard noted, "resides in this one."
"Of a two-hundred-year-old scrap of wedding dress, Susan Howe writes, 'It says nothing at all to an outsider who can look at it without being seen.' What a gift, then, that the poet-speaker of The Occupant allows herself to be so deeply seen-seen into, seen through-by the quotidian beings and objects of her life. Inside these wise, porous, funny, wrenching poems, an intimate understanding pours fr
