Mansion of Happiness

ROBIN EKISS has received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for Emerging Women Writers. Her poems have appeared widely, in the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco, California.

Up from the 'dark shaft of regret,' out from the cage of 'love and rage/whose bars are meant to be broken' come the stirring, smart-as-a-whip poems of Robin Ekiss, poems that turn memory and the strange, not uncomforting burden of it up to the light of reason—and to an acknowledgment of reason's limits—poems that argue not for 'the beautiful face of forgetting,' and not so much for love's rescuing powers, but for a belief that 'we have the machinery necessary for [love]'—without which, how is rescue possible? The Mansion of Happiness is a wondrous, instructive, and everywhere graceful book and marks the arrival of a confident and haunting new voice.