Description

The House on 14th Avenue is about paired and shared lives, featuring two people whose connection sometimes seemed forced and uneven. That of master and slave. That of trembling and acceptance. Some of the poems detail each individually, a scraping together of momentary identities; others bring them together as they embark on journeys both physical and psychic. Journeys into the past through an underworld of ancestral ghosts and paths so well-trodden there is no possibility of creating new ones. Journeys in the present through detailed lists of the physical objects around them (with the mythic bleeding through on occasion leaving only stains behind). And journeys into a future where the realization of endings looms and where the two are left once more to cope, each in his or her own way, with that knowledge. In the midst of it all lurks the manipulator of words, phrases, images -- the meta-text that tries so desperately to make sense of it all, that tries to bring order into what seems like simply a chaotic movement forward, and that wishes for, prays for, sacrifices for, a dream state where a culmination of sorts exists, if only in the mind of the creator. In the end, it is left to the reader to decide whether the "two peasants" will be allowed to escape the gravitational pull that has weighed them down...to float away from the harsh realities that have defined them into the realm of words and infinite possibility.