The House of the Tree of Sores

by Paul Cunningham

Paul Cunningham has an absolute page-turner here—maybe the rarest of things in poetry. The repetition is EXQUISITELY and MASTERFULLY executed. It's one of the best things I have read in a long time. -CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death “To enter Paul Cunningham's insidious home environment is to enter as a stranger, into his own perverse version of normalcy. With an equally deranged and seamless mix of Swedish and English, he reveals both the reader and the IKEA department store as eerie card houses or scenes, as mirror-rooms and kaleidoscopes. A madly beautiful and deeply disturbing book!” -Aase Berg, author of Hackers The House of the Tree of Sores is made of experimental, fable-like poems tightly woven with Swedish-English translingual word plays that mock and counter-weave America’s imperial English, its values and lifestyle so deeply entrenched in global economy and violence. It’s a stunning debut that only a translator-poet could have written—Paul Cunningham. -Don Mee Choi, author of DMZ Colony and translator of Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death Isolation is rife in Cunningham’s rooms (internal and external) dominated by decay and faltering voices. As the isolation creeps into more populated zones, a cacophony of systemic gore and dismemberment overtakes the reader right before it settles back down for readerly digestion. Furniture is grotesque. Transportation spits at you. Heads of cabbage, coconuts, and onions smile at the reader before it’s chopping time. The House of the Tree of Sores portrays a nightmarish world of the known, and it’s the one we live in. Honestly, this book scares me, and I cherish that fear. -Ed Steck, author of An Interface for a Fractal Landscape In the mega-store, our desires are transposed into places of access. To want milk is to look for a kitchen first. Cunningham furnishes a more liminal space as he draws the idealized shopper back into the bullet-torn bodies of war, an assistant manager learning how to lucid dream, or the confused children through which commodities “My son screams, I am a fall hazard. My daughter screams, I am a strangulation hazard.” A pointed derangement of the built world and its cultures. -Greg Nissan, author of The City is Lush / With Obstructed Views

Genres: Poetry

119 pages, Paperback

First published July 30, 2020

About the author

Paul Cunningham co-manages Action Books. He is the author of two poetry collections from Schism Press: Fall Garment (2022) and The House of the Tree of Sores (2020). His next chapbook Sociocide at the 24/7 is forthcoming from New Michigan Press in 2025. His translation of Sara Tuss Efrik's play Danse Macabre Piggies was anthologized in Experimental Writing: A Guidebook and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Cunningham currently manages the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame where he also teaches. He holds a PhD from the University of Georgia, where he was the recipient of the 2021 Diann Blakely Poetry Prize.

Reviews

[Kiran Bhat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Cunningham's The House of the Tree of Sores is a unique collection of prose poems capturing the particular anxieties one feels when learning a foreign language. Cunningham peppers his texts with Swedish not to show that he is a master of the language but that he is failing to learn. And in the meantime the world around him is passing. He is standing out as an American when he is abroad, Bolsonaro is destroying the rainforest in Brasil, Azerbaijan is destroying the land around it and expanding its borders.

I found The House of the Tree of Sores extremely particular but also extremely relatable. It very successfully evokes that feeling that only the struggle of learning a foreign language and culture can provide, and I don't think I've read another book that captures that so well. I recommend it to anyone else who has tried to integrate into a new language and place in the world, but has also failed.

[Dutchess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine some poet from the Romantic era trying to read this.

[Bob Comparda · Rating 5 out of 5]

So fun and so smart at the same time. Loved the punk lyrics that started each section, the notes at the end of each section that explained the deeper meanings and refrences, the use of the word "jawn", and the overall vibe and flow of the text.

"Hinka dinka dergen!"

[Ben Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

My eyes, mutilated by household objects.
ögon. All gone

Wounds or Words. In what direction am I looking? I no longer know what language I speak.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most exciting and unique debut collections I've ever read. Signature in its translingualism (Swedish and English) and weaving of fable and reality and confusion and misdirection and mayhem. Like eating too much peyote inside of an IKEA. Like finding a black hole in the center of America. Interview coming soon.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never read anything else like this. I loved it.

[Katrine Jensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A grotesquely dazzling, bilingually and poetically hypnotizing debut from one of my favorite poet-translators. I cannot recommend this book enough!

[Jace Brittain · Rating 5 out of 5]

A grotesquely energetic book haunted by the brilliant, transformative, beguiling voices echoing the IKEA rafters, nooks, and endlessly deepdark shelves.