Jennifer A Sutherland's second poetry collection, House of Myth and Necessity throws open the shutters of language as it is built around the concepts of girlhood, marriage, myth, and law. In the company of the figure of Euripedes' Alcestis, the poems move through houses of memory, domestic violence and divorce, cross examinations, and the Fibonacci sequence. As the collection's narrative considers love and suburban scenes, Alcestis—posed as an affidavit, as a gothic disposition on an autumn afternoon, as modern love, as elegant proof, as beads on an abacus string—changes, the idea of her walking across a stage, speaking her lines. It is then the reader discovers that they have also changed through the poems' deliberations, questionings, and the human need to stand before a court or audience and speak the self's story. A brilliant voice in American poetry, Sutherland, poet and attorney, draws her reader into the retelling of a woman's difficult moral choice in myth, astounding in both its timelessness and its originality.

Jennifer A Sutherland is a poet, essayist, and attorney in Baltimore. She is the author of the lyric-hybrid, book-length poem Bullet Points, also from River River Books (2023). Her work has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Cagibi, EPOCH, and elsewhere.

"Jennifer Sutherland once told me that, as a poet, she sometimes feels as if she's trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I beg to differ. In her House of Myth and Necessity, Sutherland creates a geometry entirely of her own. In this witty, wide-ranging collection, the wisdoms of her fields (language, law, lore [Greek myth and Baltimore]) blend seamlessly and synergistically into an entirely new shape. This House creates and then fills a completely new (and necessary) space in contemporary poetry." — MOIRA EGAN, author of The Furies

"The poems in Jennifer A. Sutherland's House of Myth and Necessity are wildly inventive—modeled after the Fibonacci sequence, a legal cross examination, and a panopticon, to name a few of her forms—and also deeply moving. Alcestis (a lesser known but fascinating character from a Euripides play) shows up repeatedly, but rarely in the same scaffolding: she is a saltine, the hanger from Mommie Dearest, and often herself (and so many of us): a woman struggling to find her voice after all she has already seen. These poems are brave and complex, and yet this book is also fun; I guarantee you will want to read it again and again." — LYNN MELNICK, author of I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive

"The poems in Jennifer A Sutherland's House of Myth and Necessity dare to enter the rooms of memory and trauma, to speak a story 'when it's returned from dead.' With Alcestis as her muse, Sutherland admits us 'through a side door' to bear witness to a story about domestic violence and how 'we don't always know disaster as disaster when it arrives'—a story that all too often goes unspoken. These poems interrogate and deconstruct cultural myths about female sexuality and womanhood, about being a wife and mother, about the real cost of difficult choices: 'There's good or there's pragmatic, a terrible dilemma.' Sutherland's poems know this hard truth, just as they know how easily an 'opened bone becomes a window.' But they also speak to the beauty of survival, which is everywhere evident in Sutherland's lyrical precision and skillful use of language. This is a brave, powerful, and necessary collection." — AMANDA NEWELL, author of Postmortem Say

"'No woman is as innocent or as austere as the writer makes her'—in House of Myth and Necessity, Jennifer A Sutherland explores this idea through her deep knowledge of the law and the myth of Alcestis. The speaker's experience of regret and loss, violence and agency, is viewed through the lens of the Euripides myth, using the language of film, mathematics, and law to question the choices we make and the intentions we have in making them. All lives are made of myth and necessity, and what we need is often brought to us through stories; this particular story of choices, consequences, and questions reminds us, 'Sometimes you have to read between the lines, coin a phrase . . .' to make new meaning. This collection is challenging, intelligent, and unlike anything I've read lately. Brava." — DONNA VORREYER, author of Unrivered