BEWARE THE HOUSE.
POEMS BY SUSANNA RICH.
In Beware the House, poet Susanna Rich book-ends a wide-ranging collection of life story-poems between two Gothic, haunted houses, the first a surreal nightmare; the second, the mock-Gothic harpsichord-punctuated world of TV’s The Addams Family. Unease, discomfort, and pain belong between two haunted places (confused birth and sardonic death), and Rich shares deeply personal accounts of her Hungarian-immigrant grandmother, obsessed in old age with Franz Liszt as an imaginary lover; and a disintegrating mother in the throes of dementia. At the center of the book are poems like glass shards of modern living, a keen and concise language palette turning the everyday into the extraordinary. Like a gypsy dance, these poems careen off common experiences — the grandmother’s kitchen, the captive butterfly, a rebellion of trees, the driven car and the rubbernecked accident. And there are villains: the predatory boor repulsed, the unteachable student lesson-taught, the empty soul of the CEO laid bare, the bad president as piñata, the lecherous poetry professor, the restless Dybbuk.
Susanna Rich is a bilingual Hungarian-American, Fulbright Fellow in Creative Writing, and Collegium Budapest Fellow — with roots in Transylvania and family ties to the Blood Countess, Elizabeth Báthory. She is a Distinguished Professor of English Studies at Kean University (NJ). Susanna is also an Emmy Award nominee, and the founding producer and principal performer at Wild Nights Productions, LLC. Her repertoire includes the musical, Shakespeare's *itches: The Women v. Will, and ashes, ashes: A Poet Responds to the Shoah. She is author of three earlier poetry collections, Television Daddy and The Drive Home (Finishing Line Press), both of which are also Wild Nights performances; and Surfing for Jesus (Blast Press).
This is the 239th publication of The Poet's Press. ISBN 978-0-922558-34-6. 145 pp., 6 x 9 inches, paperback. Published April 2019. $16.95.
Version 1.0 Updated April 17, 2020.
History of the Press
Book Listings
Anthologies
- Opus 300
- Wake Not the Dead!
- On the Verge
- Group 74
- Meta-Land
- Beyond the Rift
- Tales of Terror (2 vols)
- Tales of Wonder (2 vols)
- Tales of Terror Supplement
- Whispering Worlds
Joel Allegretti
Leonid Andreyev
Mikhail Artsybashev
Jody Azzouni
Moira Bailis
Callimachus
Robert Carothers
Samuel Croxall
Richard Davidson
Claudia Dikinis
Arthur Erbe
Erckmann-Chatrian
Emilie Glen
Emily Greco
Annette Hayn
Heinrich Heine
Barbara A. Holland
- The Holland Reader
- After Hours in Bohemia
- Selected Poems 1
- Selected Poems 2
- Shipping on the Styx
- Out of Avernus
- The Beckoning Eye
- The Secret Agent
- Medusa
- Crises of Rejuvenation
- Autumn Numbers
- Holland Collected Poems
- In the Shadows
Thomas D. Jones
Michael Katz
Li Yu
Richard Lyman
D.H. Melhem
David Messineo
Th. Metzger
J Rutherford Moss
John Burnett Payne
Edgar Allan Poe
Meleager
Ovid
Suzanne Post
Shirley Powell
Burt Rashbaum
Ernst Raupach
Susanna Rich
Brett Rutherford
- New and Recent Poems
- Island of the Dead
- Story of Niobe
- The Inhuman Wave
- Fatal Birds
- Pumpkined Heart
- Doll Without A Face
- Crackers At Midnight
- Anniversarius
- Gods As They Are, 2nd ed.
- Prometheus on Fifth Ave
- Things Seen in Graveyards
- Prometheus Chained
- Dr Jones & Other Terrors
- Trilobite Love Song
- Expectation of Presences
- Whippoorwill Road
- Poems from Providence
- Twilight of the Dictators
- Night Gaunts
- Wake Not the Dead!
- Pity the Dragon
- It Has Found You
- Autumn Symphony
- By Night and Lamp
Boria Sax
Charles Sorley
Vincent Spina
Ludwig Tieck
Pieter Vanderbeck
Jack Veasey
Jonathan Aryeh Wayne
Jacqueline de Weever
Don Washburn
Phillis Wheatley
Sarah Helen Whitman
Section Links
Featured Poets
- Joel Allegretti
- Jody Azzouni
- Boruk Glasgow
- Emilie Glen
- Annette Hayn
- Barbara A. Holland
- Donald Lev
- D.H. Melhem
- Shirley Powell
- Brett Rutherford
- Jack Veasey
- Don Washburn
- Poe & Mrs. Whitman