Cover photo: Natasha Gray
What Others Have Said About A Guest in All Your Houses:
“In these poems is a spirit that dives into prairie grasses and travels among root systems and bones before surfacing to speak in visionary tongues telling fortunes from the frozen moons of fingernails; speaking in the grainy, sepia-toned voices of windblown wives in hardscrabble 19th century Kansas; blues-tuning in Colorado and filtering New Mexico through a new language that flutters and swirls on wind that stings like a knife. ‘What use for history?’ Peter Ludwin asks in “Bluestem,” but in this book of fundamentalists and hippies, conquistadors and Anasazi spirits, history is the ghost in the land and the settlers’ steel plow. It is what makes this gorgeous book of gorgeous poems into a vision ringing like a white bone, built from the earth like adobe and crafted out of the transcendent West: ‘..a ballet of blood moons/splashing a haunted piano.’”
– Tony Barnstone, author of The Golem
“This is a marvelous book, evocative of the novels of Tony Hillerman, beautiful and true depictions of the Southwest, with more than a touch of the mystical. I’ve read many of the poems again and again, and would strongly recommend it to anyone!”
– Patrick
“With a voice informal and direct, Peter Ludwin evokes a world where people, geography and time overlap like waves, washing around and through one another. Often journeying into landscapes that initially appear barren of elements from which to draw solace, he finds a harsh beauty that sharpens the contours of the lives of those he encounters there. Memory is key for him in deepening the connections of people, including himself, to the terrains they inhabit. And history—which he clearly sees as the land’s form of memory—is always present, influencing everything, even when invisible to the casual observer. This American writer feels strongly the press of other cultures and languages—from the Anasazi and conquistadors to modern artists, from Sanskrit and Greek to Spanish and Japanese—shaping the age in which we all now live. As he says in “Night Hike, Chihuahuan Desert,” ‘What the ocean/that once frothed here/left, we inhale.’ Ludwin’s poems breathe deeply.”
– Michael Spence, author of Spine
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