House Within a House
Nicholas Dawson’s lyric memoir, House Within a House, unfurls into stirring prose poems that capture the author’s experience of depression:
Mirrors, windows, silvery trinkets: bouncing off each other, the living room’s objects reflect and converse without a sound among the shadows. I say I wish my gaze could shed light on them, but instead I listen for what’s being negotiated beyond the frames, in this perpetual offscreen where my body remains, mi cuerpo solitario que nadie ve.
Paying attention to what is beyond the frame is his task both as poet and as patient. This twinned gaze, simultaneously constrained and searching, is established in an epigraph from Gloria Anzaldúa: “Beneath your desire for knowledge writhes the hunger to understand and love yourself.” D. M. Bradford’s clean English translation of the French includes interjections left in Dawson’s native Spanish. Accompanying the author’s words are his abstract yet decipherable black-and-white photographs that recall Suzanne Doppelt’s photopoetic images. Depicting mostly domestic objects, they convey the feeling of stasis his illness brings.
The refrain “The way I remember it” opens and recurs across many paragraphs; indeed, it appears 81 times. Leaning into this subjectivity paradoxically lends the poet’s memories an authoritative ring. He establishes a mise en abyme where the layered reflections and unstable memories and sensations actively create a unique experience of the world: “one hand against the pane and the other on my face, I shape a new reflection.”
The rhythm of a personal story inlaid with untitled prose poems gives the reader brick and mortar, fact and distillate in one. Relieved of the weight of exposition, the poems float in the air between narrative and silence:
I recount my nightmares to a mirror that holds my breath: they turn to fog, steam, become a breath from another time. They fit me like a glove and turn inside out, make for a deleterious night and turn the day upside down. The waves now mix awake and asleep, hold me on the edge of open sea in an endless daybreak