Allison Wilkins is the author of Girl Who (2014) and her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Sierra Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Superstition Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She is the assistant director for Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki and Thasos.
PRAISE:
Welcome to the House of Broken Tables, but watch your step. As you move from room to room, stanza to stanza (subtle sonnets, ironic couplets), you will encounter smashed plates, a “cloth napkin strangled by a ring,” a scarred bedside table; the “grief of leaving,” the “joy hot enough to burn pine.” You will encounter goats and peacocks, hybrids and hooved beings; Nausicaa and Calypso, Odysseus and Orpheus. In this collection, mythic in scope, intimate in detail, Allison Wilkins adds to that very necessary contemporary sub-genre of poetry: women reclaiming ancient tales and figures, subverting and modernizing them, making them our own. The voice is powerful, even oracular. Cassandra, too, speaks: this time, listen to her.
–Moira Egan
In House of Broken Tables, Allison Wilkins gathers the shimmer from what’s been shattered in myth and in modern times. This book is a graceful atlas of longing and a gorgeous testament for what love leaves behind.
–Aimee Nezhukumatathil
In House of Broken Tables, Allison Wilkins builds a richly intimate world out of fragments, miniatures, and wry self-portraits. These poems call to one another across pages and centuries, the mythic tangling and overlapping with the contemporary, the epic mingling with the finite, and the knowable conversing with the mysterious. While acknowledging that “on the wrong day anything looks like ruin,” Wilkins is a master at reassembling what’s broken.
–Chelsea Rathburn
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