The Porch is a Journey Different From the House

A 2003 New Issues Poetry Prize Selection

"To test the limits of language, as Ever Saskya does in her stunning debut book, The Porch is a Journey Different from the House, is to test also the limits of what and how we might know the world that is, as Bruno Schulz shows us, alive under the world we thought we knew. This is a book whose journey takes us from the porch to the seemingly limitless vaults of a medieval cathedral, and then those ancient vaults of the entire universe. Undercutting almost every linear and confined 'map' of thinking and feeling, but also providing a new compass for us to use, these poems take us through a 'galaxy of trailer park geraniums' to confront personal and metaphysical issues in a totally unique way." -Richard Jackson

"How do we read?-when everything around us needs to be read-history, heredity, our home on earth . . . By rewriting language is the answer suggested by this marvelously agile, rangy first collection. It opens up the question of image in brand new ways, enacted on the page. And whether she's being theoretical, philosophical, scientific, or reminiscent, Ever Saskya's also always having fun, which sends a bolt of joy through the reader, too." -Cole Swensen

"There's a lot of complaining in American poetry, from disputes between the Post-Avant and the "School of Quietude" to gripes about the mounds of flashy first books and supposedly rigged contest that publish them; but after reading The Porch is a Journey Different From the House it's clear that this complaining would disappear pretty quickly if all first books were this good . . . Though Saskya wrestles with many of the fashionable interest of Post-Avant poetry and literary theory, what sets this book apart is the quality of emotion and the sense that these ideas are central to how the speaker of these poems lives, organizes, and understands her specific life. In other words, the questions raised are not theoretical, but intensely personal." -LitBridge

"In a book in which the reader has been forewarned that nothing is as it seems, that behind every actuality there resides another lexographic or hidden life, it is only fitting that the characters in the poems experience also this marriage of language and physicality. The synechodal bridegroom is also appropriate in a book that proclaims that signs can stand in for the whole. We enter a poem, only to find that it exists 'In the Outline of a City Turned Sideways,' or that we leave with what we were not expecting . . ." -Jenny Boully, Maisonneuve