The Black House

by Bianca Stone

Bianca Stone’s chapbook of intimate, searching and darkly humorous prose poems moves amidst the unconscious manifesting in the external world, the reconciliation of the conscious self and the symbolic significance behind our symptoms. Rather than attending to the details of empirical events, these poems tap into universal forms of the psyche and the understanding that our symptoms are often wounds to which we love and tend.

Through the use of epistolary address as well as a rogue self-case history, this chapbook depicts the sometimes-voice of a “commander-in-chief” in an inverted office: The Black House, run by a flawed executive leader of one’s own life. Drawing from psychological, poetic and phenomenological traditions via the works of Freud, Jung, Deleuze and Bachelard (among others), these poems examine love and desire, self and other, metaphor and transference as paradoxical phenomena that express the manifold of our experience.

37 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2023

About the author

Bianca Stone is a writer and visual artist. She was born and raised in Vermont and moved to New York City where she received her MFA from NYU in 2009. Her poems, poetry comics, and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review and many others.

She has returned to Vermont with her husband and collaborator, the poet Ben Pease, where she is director of programs for The Ruth Stone House, a literary nonprofit artist residency, letterpress studio and community poetry center.

Reviews

[Jordan Castinado · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Black House deserves a far better review than I can give it right now (and ideally after a far more attentive read than the speedrun I gave it amidst Thanksgiving busyness in a hotel), but I'll jot down some thoughts.

If you're considering picking up this (gorgeous, may I add) little prose-poetry chapbook, The Black House reads like the baby lovechild of Stone's most recent works What is Otherwise Infinite and The Mobius Strip Club of Grief, expanding on and growing the themes of those two prior works while recounting the poet/speaker's journey to deep psychoanalytic hell and daily press-briefer banalities in her newly dark-painted domicile—the eponymous Black House—in the depths of psychological malaise during years of mass political and psychological grief of the pandemic.

(Which, side note: makes this an excellent set of pandemic poems while also not wed solely to the pandemic or pandemic-era politics which occur almost entirely off-stage here; it's like Bo Burnam's Inside but for folks who prefer exploring the psychology of pandemic shelter-in-place through prose poems by an author who also writes deep and deeply funny poetry about gnosticism and certain jaunty post-mortem strip clubs where you can meet your dead grandmothers for a song or two).

While The Black House is surely a progression in form for Stone and very much its own thing (if the departure from verse into prose poetry isn't an obvious cue of new and funky and risky goings-on!), this newest little volume does—for all the growth evinced in the poet's craft (and speaker's interior life alike given what seems an oft-thin veil between the two)—show itself to be solidly in and of Stone's oeuvre, featuring Otherwise Infinite's characteristic heavy metaphysics and heady allusions to the thinkers and fables of the western philosophical and metaphysical traditions, but also with a return of some of the familiar absurdity, surrealism, and deeply personal psychological interiority and confessional explorations of the latter (and, certainly, the psycho-locational lietmotiff of Stone's Black House not unlike the MSCOG in...MSCOG, here presented as a literal dark-painted house where the poet-speaker lives in but also as a sort of anti-White House where aspects of the speaker's self address internal goings-on in press releases as the soverign of her psychological state; a brilliant metaphor/motif where advisors play double roles and the Zoom/Webex is a way to address the reader/self/nation from Stone's own espresso-colored interior Oval Office).

Ever present in this work is also, certainly, the characteristic dark humor, candor, unsparing attention to line and language, and deftness of turn from high to low registers and voices between (and sometimes within) poems that all, for me at least, mark Bianca Stone's work. Stone's theme of familial mental illness and suicidality and the shadow of familial influence are all also present, though (at risk of a spoiler) with a turn that suggests some final hard-won synthesis or growth.

Anyway. I need to get laundry done and go roll the ole' stone of a thousand other overdue tasks up Monday's hill, so I'll finish this off with a quick speed round of vibes and themes and textures at play here (at ever so slight risk of spoilers):

Interiority; inhabitation of space; domiciles and domesticity; psychology; suffocation; pandemic times; Trump times; videoconference; telehealth; grief; depression; suicidality; fall/autumn; New England; breaking cycles; mourning and honoring ancestors while escaping the reach of their influence; breaking cycles of inter-generational trauma or illness; motherhood; grandmotherhood; granddaughterhood; familial obligations; duty to same; drear and drudgery; banality and sameness of eons; and/or of chores and relationships; psychoanalysis/psychotherapy; philosophy; theory; [lots of big names in the preceding fields I recognize but whose works I am not familiar with]; western metaphysics; neurosis; archetypes; visionary journeys and breakthroughs; go-deeper-into-the-pain-to-get-out-of-it; hanging on for dear life; making it; childhood.

PS — By way of warning (and of praise): reading Bianca Stone while in a depressive nadir on the cusp of December is decidedly the wrong internal and external weather in which to curl up with a Bianca Stone collection; which makes it exactly the right set and setting to fully appreciate Bianca Stone and prove her skill as her work is so deeply infomed by grief, depression, interiority, and the depths of long winters personal and seasonal alike in a way that some readers (*cough* me) may find for better and worse resonant.

PPS — I feel bad giving this chapbook a 3/5 so shortly after its release with so little reviewer/rating activity so far lest I skew the rating. I tend to be a more sparing reviewer than most, and for me 3 stars is like...oh this is good (maybe even really good, as in this case), but just not entirely my thing.

[santana · Rating 5 out of 5]

“i can’t look—yet i can’t not look. reverie rips through like a plague, well prophesied. it feels lonely, demonic, selfish, devout. something antigone would do? well, like, i never had any goals to begin with, only tragic desires, rolling around in the grass, like a goose hit in the head with a golf ball, weeping, with no end in sight, no language to assign blame. no love-cure for the people.”