Little Houses, Athena Nassar

“a part of you wants to stay wedged / in the throat of what will kill you.” 

Athena Nassar’s piercing debut full-length collection, Little Houses, unravels one American family’s conflicted Southern existence. Nassar’s speaker first surfaces from an alligator’s mouth to beckon readers through a series of revolving doors. Behind one door, she reckons with a complex history of colonization; behind another, Princess Peach mourns her own hard-coded impotence. In this way, Nassar does not shy from exploring all sides of her speaker’s sexuality, heritage, and familial connections. To occupy her Little Houses is to find freedom in contradiction.

“In Athena Nassar’s debut collection Little Houses, the poems themselves ‘weep honey / so rich that they dare the painter / himself to crave yellow’ through her searing critique of America and tireless devotion to her own history. This is the truest incarnation of love: holding history accountable for its terror and beauty. But here the poet does not portray a simple portrait of colonization and the colonized but rather exposes how entanglements of Empire yield their hungry ghosts in these tightly wrought lines as family and relationships work through their faceted complications. These poems evidence a powerful, dynamic new voice that will reverberate in readers’ minds long after they close the book.”

—Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Taxidermist’s Cut

“In Little Houses, Athena Nassar meditates with unusual clarity on the complexities of race and displacement, the pervasiveness of violence, and the vagaries of love and sex. In poems at once deeply personal and vast in scope, the weight of history and memory hangs heavy—imperial, ancient, familial, and personal. This is a marvelous debut collection by a poet deeply attuned to the possibilities of language and introspection.”

—Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction

“In her prolific debut, Athena Nassar transports her readers with poems that evolve like vividly kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, each one rich in risk and feeling, music and metaphor. In Little Houses, people ‘sit like crescent moons / dropped from the sky,’ light pours from the sun ‘like a runny egg,’ ‘the aroma of apricots hangs / in the air like fresh linens,’ tongues can transform into eels, a dead goat’s eyes into halved peaches, the self into ‘a housefly floating in a cold glass of milk.’ Tangible, sensual, surreal, Nassar’s poems are at once vitally in touch with our seething American moment and mindful of the vital commerce between personal and cultural history. ‘I am a lover of all things defiant in nature,’ Nassar declares, which is the credo that also marks this poet as one of the avareh, one ‘of the longing souls.’”

—Daniel Tobin, author of Blood Labors

 

“‘I am a lover of all things defiant in nature,’ Nassar writes, and Little Houses offers proof of such defiance. This debut shimmers with confidence and imagination, taking us on an exhilarating journey from Georgia to Egypt to Boston, from the fever dream of girlhood to the fortitude and fragility of brothers, parents, ancestors, and gods. Here lie sexual politics and ghosts, house parties and bone yards, brunch girls and Kant. Lush, damning, always coming back to the body and the many houses it populates, creates, and dismantles, Little Houses is sure to thrill, and thrill again.”

—Corey Van Landingham, author of Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens