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About the Book
Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award, Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? is an unsettling poetic fairy tale based in a real-world marriage.
Straddling genres―prose poetry, micro memoir, fairy tale, autofiction―Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? is first and foremost the story of a marriage. Borrowing elements from surrealist writers and artists, it explores the effects of chronic illness, disability, and a spouse’s gender transition. All of these issues swirl through the central marital relationship and the daily lives of its two lead characters, Sergeant and Grim―even as the book’s narrator, unreliable and unobjective, increasingly takes center stage. Reminiscent of writers like Sabrina Orah Mark and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, this book is as engrossing as it is experimental, traversing complicated domestic and emotional terrain by way of Allison Blevins’ vivid imagination.
Persea Books, 2024
Pieces from Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? were first published in Brevity, Raleigh Review, The Night Heron Barks, Rust and Moth, and elsewhere.
Wryly capturing the layered and interpolating voices of the self, the genre-bending Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? explores what it means to have a body among bodies, to love over time, and to live while also watching (or writing) one’s life from a vantage point. This new collection from Allison Blevins is absolutely compelling, guiding us into the space between agency and pain with extraordinary intimacy.
—Cass Donish, author of Your Dazzling Death
Reading Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? is as full and nuanced an experience—as richly satisfying, too—as getting to know a brilliant and honest person, immersing yourself in the many facets of their story. Is this a book-length narrative poem about a queer blended family? Yes. Is this a book-length lyric essay about sexuality and mortality, gender and power, love and loyalty? Yes. Is this a finely wrought poetic sequence that lays bare the questions and insights of a lesbian mother and partner struggling with a progressive illness and chronic pain? Yes. Is this a profound meditation and postmodern fable of what it means to be human, burdened and buoyed by our fellow humans, burdened and buoyed by our own bodies? Yes. I decided when I began this book that I would highlight only the most meaningful lines. Now every page gleams bright yellow, which is to say every single page is gold.
—Julie Marie Wade, author of Skirted and Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems
In her newest work, Allison Blevins has made for us a singular language that exists in spaces between genres. A seamless collection of micro memoirs and prose poetry, Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? asks the difficult questions as it focuses on the jagged and often truncated desires of Grim and the Sergeant. Their shared existence in this singular narrative—exploring themes of chronic illness, disability, and a spouse’s gender transition—is at once vitally complex and simply heartbreaking.
—Jon Pineda, author of Let’s No One Get Hurt