Metal House of Cards by Amanda Maret Scharf and Hannah Smith

In the beautiful collaborative chapbook, Metal House of Cards, Amanda Maret Scharf and Hannah Smith explore place, queer love, and the art of seamless intertwining of two distinct voices. Written through a Midwestern power outage during a scorching summer, these poems wonderfully weave together environment, relationships, and self—comfortably moving from the past to present with lines like “In college, / I was told patience was a virtue, but I kept looking / for a different kind of goodness” to “I live below sea level and pretend / I’m ok.” These poems become snapshots speaking to each other with energy, yet also playfulness. Witnessing two voices come together so flawlessly, leaves us as readers with stunning poems where Scharf and Smith gracefully blur into one another through their words, lines, and imagery. This book reminds of the importance of collaboration—it was a joy to read!

–Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press)

When I read this book, I was constantly reminded of those model towns built on nuclear test sites—those strange smiling dolls and their picture-perfect homes, moments before disaster. The poems in Amanda Maret Scharf and Hannah Smith’s Metal House of Cards are of the same universe, each of them beginning with familiar portraits of life before lifting the lid on a darkness lurking beneath. Scharf and Smith wrangle with the experience of being human, of the complex emotional landscape that comes with loving and losing. And this book beckons us to witness, tells us to “make me / throw something sharp while [we] watch.”

–Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times (Soft Skull Press) and Bloodwarm (Variant Literature)

In this mesmerizing collaborative chapbook, desire and grief are synesthetic and spatial. A gaze becomes a violin, body a bouquet, words held to the light. Together, Scharf & Smith weave a voice at once vast and singular, shedding inherited narratives and cataloguing “the long burning / of before” with gorgeous fervor. These poems dream of big love—the kind that refuses any script, returns “color to the throat,” makes us endless.

–Patrycja Humienik, author of We Contain Landscapes  (Tin House, 2025)

Set in a blackout during a heatwave, Metal House of Cards opens in the first-person plural and splinters off into an epistolary exchange, into a duet of anticipation and restlessness. Amanda Maret Scharf and Hannah Smith’s poems are perpetually in motion, churning forward while looking backward, existing in the space between waiting for something to begin and “zoom[ing] in on everything I might miss.” Compressed, associative, lucid, both fractured and eloquent, Metal House of Cards is a literary pas de deux to the generative power of friendship.

–Jacques J. Rancourt, author of Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books) and Novena (Pleiades Press)