Blue House

Blue House was selected by Mary Jo Bang for publication by the Poetry Society of America in 2009 as part of the New American Poets Chapbook Series. In her introduction Bang writes, "Christopher Nelson's poems brilliantly enact the Dickinsonian maxim (the maxim that this poetic age has taken to heart and writ large against the backdrop of postmodernism) to tell the truth but tell it slant. In that, he is little different from many of us. However (and it is a significant 'however'), what sets his poems apart and makes them inimitably his is that he invites the reader into a brazenly Freudian psychological landscape. And in we go—in horror, in fascination, in amusement, in respect, and in realization that Nelson has gotten it right. And moreover gotten it very right. And moreover yet, has gotten it very right with a minimum of words and with a great deal of white space. He renders moot all automatic contemporary readerly resistances: to high lyric notes (the lark), to poems about childhood (poetic childhood has rarely been represented so darkly), to words that have come to seem empty ('remember,' 'tender'). His is an intrepid imagination full of uncanny derring-do."

To read a poem from Blue House, click here. To read a review, click here.