I'll Build Us a Home

“If you approach a house to tame it, every conditional wish asks for a space to hold what we feel. I’ll Build Us a Home is a curio cabinet of what’s been collected / what remains uncertain & just beyond reach, reminding us “how nerves help us navigate/the world” & that “all myths/begin with dirt.” Wilson lists what is rooted & where & asks us to step inside of what shelter springs from necessity / what is built by the disquieted mind & uncooperative body to approximate home.”

—Emily O’Neill, author of You Can’t Pick Your Genre

“Emily Paige Wilson captures the way that love is always searching for an impossible language, inventing homes of “banded amethyst, basil, and bird cages” inside the mind of the lover. These brilliant devotional poems are incantations, spells, and prayers made manifest. Wilson’s dexterity with language and sound builds a tiny house within each line, giving form to longing’s jittery feelings, while at the same time creating something beautiful and new. They are fierce, political, intimate, playful, and heartbreakingly honest poems. Who stands as witness inside the house of new love? “Sometimes I foolishly still think we are the only ones,” she writes. And in this way, she has written a book for everyone.”

—Sarah Messer, author of Dress Made of Mice

“In I’ll Build Us a Home, Emily Paige Wilson explores the tumultuous fringes of intimacy. The heir to Adrienne Rich’s world-weaving spiders, Bachelard’s abodes, and Björk’s private rituals, Wilson’s poetry slips between oceans and swamps, weightlessness and the body, and constantly reassesses the illusory boundaries of love. What tender spaces resist definition? How do we interpret the unknown’s ability to shift in and out of language? And what are we afraid or reluctant to compromise? In Wilson’s poems, if “the mouth [is] as empty as a house,” what lived there once? What frogs continue to feel unheard in those dark swamps of the mind?”

—Roy G. Guzmán, author of the chapbook, Restored Mural for Orlando