Sasha Steensen’s third volume is a lyric inquiry into a personal history of the back-to-the-land idealism of the 1970s, with its promises and failings, naturalism gone awry, and journeys into the worlds of addiction, recovery, and, ultimately, family. “If family is a body, learn its anatomy,” Steensen writes early in the book, immediately before upending all our expectations and giving us new thoughts to think.

“Steensen’s poems of a back-to-the-land childhood and the quirks of nature are sudden, mysterious, beautiful, and sharp—little surprises found when wandering in the woods around a homestead. —Melissa Coleman

Like the Oppen she takes as her epigraph, Sasha Steensen’s is a poetry that feels magically made via both subtraction and building. With language as lush as Hopkins’ and then as small and weird as Niedecker’s, Steensen tells a story, or alights in and out of a story, all her own. It’s an American story, too, with all the bloodiness and experiment that such a thing requires. —Maggie Nelson

REVIEWS

Sasha Steensen’s books are more lyric project than poetry collection. While many collections of poetry have themes that tie the poems together, Steensen’s books use their subject as a nexus around which the project grows, as if Steensen free-associated around the subject and developed individual pieces from there. House of Deer, Steensen’s intricate and lovely third collection, centers on her back-to-the-land childhood. —Hazel & Wren

The family is the history of the species. The family is the history of love & place & force & naming. The family is a history of home— & if home is both "a site and an event," then the family is a history of what happens. In physics, an "event" is a single occurence of a process, a point in spacetime. When & where, & also how the family moves through, how it is moved by history & how it moves history. —Jacket 2

Sasha Steensen’s Ohio is eerie and weedy-wild, full of the tender and the brutal in matter-of-fact convergence.  House of Deer is a story of childhood, but it approaches the time—the 1970s—with both nostalgia and violence.  We at once imagine a girl whose hair is streaming in verdant fields and something ominous in the woods beyond her. —The Rumpus