How many times have you longed to re-enter that intense realm of your first friendships? How clearly do you remember the voodoo of childhood: the secret telepathies, the deliberately obfuscated, whisper-curtained world where we were all double-agents—on one side, the adult world spinning like a merry-go-round we were expected to run alongside and leap onto—on the other side the real world of objects athrum with sentience, friends whose smiles and glances carried whole rivers of meaning, pacts made between hearts still discovering and inventing friendship?

The Haunted House, by Marisa Crawford, forthcoming in April, 2010 from Switchback Books, is not a nostalgic time-trip, or a self-serving sentimental hiatus meant to soothe a reader lonesome for feeling young, it’s a worm-hole into a former reality, that “weird winter when we were obsessed with keeping caterpillars as pets,” and when “there were tons of little grasshoppers the color of pebbles back in the part of the field that was covered in pebbles.” It is also a strange mirror, reflecting the magic assemblage of superstition, hearsay, motherly and grandmotherly tales, advertising, bibles-and-lip-gloss, suicidally booby-trapped genetics, and costume-jewelry voodoo out of which girls assemble a self-identity.

Crawford’s book is a softly shocking, sensory-waking collection of elegiac poems about childhood and young-adult friendships and how that not-adult, not-child changeling time is when we view ourselves and each other with the deepest acuity. Her free-verse poems are driven by a disarming combination of humor, true affection for her subjects, and a slightly off-kilter sense of the eerie quality of the everyday. There are tastes, scents, touches, thoughts, gut-feelings, knowings, voices: images so rich they cast a shadow over the now. Crawford’s haunting is not a chain-rattling, gasp-producing, cobweb-strewn startlefest—it’s a reverse-haunting. It’s a house filled with rooms, each of which contains a remembered desire, a string of fulfilled senses: a body-memory of skating backwards at the roller rink, or of discovering the mysteries in the green webs on the back of a dollar bill. This book is spooky because sometimes it feels realer than what passes for real.

Perhaps one of the most lingering and ecstatic effects of reading The Haunted House is that it reminds the reader what it used to feel like to really spend time with people. So much of contemporary communication is rooted in trying to maintain sudden and constant contact with as many people as possible, to shout through phones across the country to one another in crowded elevators, to type something witty or wise or exasperated onto a white space and hit the enter key to broadcast “status”, to sing like a bird into space, awaiting echoes. Crawford, in poem after poem, recreates the intimate, curiosity-driven experience of becoming friends, and of becoming one’s own person. She dials you up on a pink land-line with a hologram sticker. Her language is simple and direct, unearthing the strange and necessary tactile details we are so deprived of in electronic clutter: Crawford's “plastic cherry perfume pours up the eaves and out the windows. She shows "how a blue rose glows.”

Read The Haunted House: you’ll want to move in, you’ll be delighted that “Every freckle on her body is an auburn heart,” and that “Every spider in the attic is building a sweater.” It will make you feel like "The sky is made of Lycra. Chocolate-syrup solar eclipse, maraschino cherry, hole in the ozone. I could touch the bottom. I could lick the spoon.”

The Haunted House (forthcoming in April, 2010)
by Marisa Crawford (Winner of the Gatewood Prize, selected by Denise Duhamel)
Cover art: Orion Shepherd
(37 pages/Switchback Books, Chicago 2010)
ISBN-13: 978-0-9786172-5-7
ISBN-10: 0-9786172-4-X

reviewed by LJ Moore editor.moore(at)gmail.com