When the House is Quiet by Kirsten Jones Neff

Don’t let the delicate grace of Kirsten Neff‘s voice fool you: in these poems chronicling the diurnal orbits of a woman’s life, the raising of a family and the familiarity of a long marriage, she reveals with deft precision the indelibility of all we can and cannot hold, “the place/where the leaf of ourselves lifts slightly/in the chill wind.” Her vision is at once of “the exquisite painting into which we were born” and the sidelong awareness of our frailty and mortality, her language as tender but as sure as a hand resting on a sleeping child.     —Kate Moses, author of Cakewalk and Wintering, A Novel of Sylvia Plath

Deeply personal and deeply felt, Kirsten Neff’s poems radiate love and human connection in an earthy, honest and unflinching voice. When The House Is Quiet is a graceful debut collection that is lyrical, moving and wise.

–Rose Black, author of Clearing and Winter Light

In her prize-winning collection of poems, When The House Is Quiet, Kirsten Neff has given us light: from the “meager wisps of sun” in a winter kitchen to “Technicolor evening promises” of childhood to light glistening from “ardent grapes”. These poems gleam and surprise with the beauty of their language and the power of close observation as a woman explores the permutations of family. Ms Neff uses the lens of memory to capture breathtaking moments of connection to her children, her husband, her landscape, her self. These are rich poems, worthy of repeated savoring.

–Catharine Clark-Sayles, author of One Breath and Lifeboat

In her first poetry collection, Kirsten Neff captures the illusory butterfly of what you might call modern domestic bliss. Within these poems lies a clear-eyed understanding of the ambivalence entailed in such a crazy proposition, tempered with the sweet, contradictory hope that such bliss, or something like it, is achievable. She writes as a mother, wife, and even – casting back in time – as a just-forming individual, a member of her first family, but the constant is always her open heart. She has the wise voice of someone who knows all joys are fleeting, but that some can be grown in the enveloping warmth of a true home, and held there, at least for the duration of a childhood. When The House Is Quiet is a wistful and fierce debut.

–Mary Pols, author of the memoir Accidentally on Purpose