Brett Rutherford - Big House, Rent Cheap

In this dazzling collection, American neo-Romantic Brett Rutherford has chosen 28 poems that center on houses, castles, huts, and palaces, urban apartments and city lofts. In these fantastic and unpredictable works, locale is the basis from which narratives are spun out.

Locales for these powerful narratives include the Tang Dynasty’s Forbidden Palace, the house and garden of ancient Roman king Numa Pompilius, a New England colonial schoolhouse, the Moscow apartment of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, a fairy-land castle in Northumberland, a loft in Manhattan, the Amherst home of Emily Dickinson, and a row of empty houses in embattled Kyiv. Other poems involve homes visited or lived in during childhood, and memories of a grandmother and two look-alike, nervous aunties.

Strange female figures haunt the edges of these writings, in the guise of a Chinese Emperor’s concubine, a mysterious Chelsea saloniste, a mansard-roof Siren, a possessive mother with a butcher knife, revenants returning as vampires, and a bed-and-breakfast hostess in a basement freezer.

Plague is the non-human specter that casts a dark shadow over two elegiac works,  “The Loft on Fourteenth Street,” and “The Keys to His Apartment.” In another poem, “Where Is My Golden Butterfly?” the poet channels the emotions and memories of intubated COVID patients whose minds seem to broadcast into others’ dreams.

This thematic collection is a “house tour” of the imagination, a reader’s journey accessible to all.

This is the 362nd publication of The Poet’s Press. Published March 2025.