Composed over the course of a single year, the three sequences in Stacy Szymaszek's tenth book, About the House, make room through attention. The rituals that provoke these poems are rooted in conversation and communion, joining chance encounter with the familiar. Drawing on journal writing, folk poetics, prayer, and bibliomancy, Szymaszek explores the intimacies of sharing space with human, plant, ghost, and animal others. "I sit and think and in thinking / I mind my own business," Szymaszek writes, making solitude both social and generative. Rife with the materials of a day—sprouting onions, lemon oil, snake hash, gossip, a broken stove, and correspondence—the poems in About the House are crafty and magnetic.

Stacy Szymaszek's recent titles include The Pasolini Book (2022), Famous Hermits (2023), and Essay (2025). She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry, and was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. Szymaszek lives in New York's Upper Hudson Valley on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people, who, due to forced removal, reside in Northeast Wisconsin as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community.

"About the House begins with a head injury and ends in a den of snakes, perilous scenes which Szymaszek's reverential attention and careful language make as cozy as drinking morning coffee in a book-lined sun-filled studio in an old house in the autumn of life and in the middle of nowhere. This book is a quiet, life-affirming pleasure." — JENNIFER MOXLEY

"In Stacy Szymaszek's About the House, the house is haunted by the poet and the poet is haunted by the house. The house might also be the book, the body, or an empty can. It is a place to listen. As the book's prayers, rooms, and snakes follow the poet and are followed in turn, moving through various obstacles and loosely recorded with a loving ear, they return to wholeness and the poem is made." — RICHARD MEIER

"I found it exhilarating to be lured into this melodious triptych of dark and light and winding places by a guide as formidable as Stacy Szymaszek. About The House delves into the intimacies of ecos, oikos, and literal household—of individual and collective cycles of life and death—and arrives as a timely reminder that poets practice the sacred art of going deep into an upside down world and illuminating its bleak recesses. Szymaszek is skilled at entering these depths, these queer crevices of redemption and resistance that exist within language itself." — ISAAC JARNOT

"About the House is so specific, so alive in the daily. I felt a fiery intention moving through it, a sort of glowing sword that cuts through life-crap, and the sword said this to me: 'I will try to live where I am and find signs there old wood stove, helpful snakes, neighbor at store, broken stuff in the house. These signs tell me how to live. I see what happens when. What happens when. Where am I, I find myself with the world that is with me. It doesn't end here.'" — CATHERINE WAGNER