My Personal Favorite with Diane Lockward
A Poetry Blog
This blog only asks the poet to answer one two-part question: At this moment, which of your poems is your personal favorite, and why?
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Commentary from editor, Diane Lockward:
When I was planning to do What the House Knows, an anthology of poems about houses, I put out a call for submissions. I had a feeling the call would garner a good response, but I was astonished to receive 1169 submissions, most with three poems. “Open House” by Susana Gonzales was an instant favorite and remains one of my favorites. This poem goes straight to the heart. It’s only eight lines, but consider how much is accomplished in those eight lines. A marriage has ended. The speaker’s house has been put up for sale. The speaker is devastated. As is typical when a house is on the market, an open house is held on Sundays. Prospective buyers and the curious pass through and gawk at what’s inside the house. The poet uses the image of a car wreck to convey the wreckage of her marriage. The car is destroyed and the victim lies in the road, damaged and exposed. We feel her shame at such exposure, the embarrassment that is often felt when a marriage dissolves. The poem’s couplets are an ideal form for a poem about what has happened to a couple’s marriage.
Susana Gonzales has lived in twenty-four homes. Growing up on Air Force bases resulted in a strong need for home and much of her poetry explores that necessity. She has been published in various anthologies and journals, including The Power of the Feminine I, Sheila-Na-Gig, One Art, and As You Were: The Military Review.
Diane Lockward is the editor of What the House Knows and three previous poetry anthologies, all published by Terrapin Books. She is also the editor of four books on the craft of poetry, most recently The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her four poetry collections include The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement (Wind Publications, 2016), which received the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. Her other awards include a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a Woman of Achievement Award. Her poems have been included in such journals as the Harvard Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Writer’s Almanac. She is the founder and publisher of Terrapin Books.
Purchase this wonderful anthology here on Bookshop or here on Terrapin.
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A little about your host:
KELLY FORDON's latest poetry collection, What Trammels the Heart, was published by SFAPress in 2025. She is the author of a short story collection, I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020), another poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press, 2019), and a novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, (WSUP, 2015.) She teaches at Springfed Arts in Detroit and online, where she also runs a fiction podcast called “Let's Deconstruct a Story.” http://www.letsdeconstructastory.substack.com.
PS: What Trammels the Heart is on sale right now for 40% off at tamupress.com with the code HEART40 :)