Dream House

Cathy Stonehouse
Publisher: Nightwood Editions

Book Description

A long poem in six sections, Dream House takes its cue from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space in its investigation of female embodiment, calling up such feral, liminal spaces as the pregnant body, the aging mind, snail shells, broom closets, low-ceilinged pubs and abandoned pizza boxes. Part Tardis, part townhouse, part Howl’s Moving Castle, this wry, surreal and many-peopled narrative interrogates what metaphor might hold of history, both personal and social, after a mother’s passing. Its migrant speaker trawls through hedgerows and recipe books to unearth stained birdsong and undead civil wars, tracing a matrilineal path across four generations while traversing the haunted margins between existence and belonging.

Author Bio

Cathy Stonehouse (she/they) is a poet, writer, teacher and visual artist. As a young adult, Cathy migrated from Northern England, where she was born, to Vancouver, BC—the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, where she still lives. She is the author of a novel, The Causes (Pedlar Press, 2019), a collection of short fiction, Something About the Animal (Biblioasis, 2011) and three collections of poetry, Dream House (Nightwood Editions, 2023), Grace Shiver (Inanna Publications, 2011) and The Words I Know (Press Gang, 1994). She also co-edited the anthology Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), with Fiona Tinwei Lam and Shannon Cowan. She is a previous editor of EVENT magazine and currently teaches creative writing and interdisciplinary expressive arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC.