House Within a House (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
Depression hits everyone a little differently, but Dawson’s collection of poetry and essays encapsulates the prolonged and ever-present pain beautifully. This book made me feel seen and exceptionally vulnerable. Though House Within A House is excruciatingly personal, it put words to feelings I had no idea how to express. Dawson’s descriptions of his depression invoke the claustrophobia of being stuck in your head, the fuzziness of memory, and the ebbing energy of this mental illness. Thank you to Nicholas Dawson for writing this.
-Izzy
— From Mesmerizing May Staff Picks
Description
A meditation on the wiles of depression, illuminated by queer and diasporic experience.
"We, nosotros, nosotras: somos sobrevivientes." Weaving prose poetry, essay, autobiography and photography in mutual contamination, Nicholas Dawson relates his own deep depression, a state never fully gone, always cohabitant. Amidst this persistence, "the body and the pen bring a plural syntax of alternative knowledges into being, one which allows us to know the world better, to know ourselves better, to better love daybreak and this sun obstinately piercing the curtain with its brazen rays."
House Within a House, in a luminous translation by D.M. Bradford, tells the story of what walls the depressed person in, what keeps them wandering inside, and what finally gets them, somehow, out of the house. The original book, D sormais, ma demeure, received the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montr al.
