White Door by Burgi Zenhaeusern

In a wide range of formally varied and playful poems, the speaker of White Door explores her emigration to the US from a European country as an adult: how fundamentally and irreversibly distance and longing change old perspectives and memories; how watching her child grow up in a in many ways alienating environment helped root her while challenging ideas of herself; what a complex and ambivalent web of emotions questions of home and belonging can set off; how there is no one nor any definite answer. In that sense, the poems are largely autobiographical and self-reflective. Their poetry is firmly rooted in the speaker's everyday and the bonds that hold her.

From the first astonishing poem of White Door you can feel it—the stitching together of separated things, the line pulling away from the sentence and then hard-threaded back at stanza’s end, the then pulling away from the now, the child from the mother, frayed, and then hand-sewn back. Burgi Zenhaeusern’s language is stitch-work, textile, sensory, but the kind of sensory that begins to lean figurative, to mean more than it says. The I can be “light forced through / split clouds,” or “my shiny coin” can be “falling into the empty well of me—its bright ping,” the sun can be a she, “her mouth a white-hot hole,” fear can be “packed like old snow.” When I look up after disappearing into the careful weave of these poems, I am amazed to find how far moved I am from where I started, how completely everything behind me has changed in the new light.

- Kathryn Cowles, author of Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World

Framed by the tender ordinary, by branches through the kitchen window, by generational memory and a grandfather’s painted Alpine meadow, Burgi Zenhaeusern’s White Door asks the central question of poetry: “How long / can you continue without yearning?” Simone Weil wrote that unmixed attention is prayer, and this collection streams with the light of attention and language that feels to me holy.

- Han VanderHart, author of Larks

Burgi Zenhaeusern (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Behind Normalcy (CityLit Press, 2020), winner of the Harriss Poetry Prize. Her work appears in a variety of journals and has been anthologized. Born and raised in Switzerland, she came to the US as an adult. She lives outside Washington D.C. on Nacotchtank and Piscataway land.

Paperback: $16. ISBN: 978-1-257-75664-3

Order information is forthcoming in November!