Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down?: Poems

Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award, 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 as much of contemporary fiction by writers like Sabrina Orah Mark and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum as of poets or memoirists, this book is as engrossing as it is experimental, traversing complicated difficult domestic and emotional terrain by way of Allison Blevins’ vivid imagination.