The Haunted House by Marisa Crawford

The Haunted House Reviews

• 
  Valerie

  I've been looking forward to this book since I read some of Crawford's poetry in
  Action Yes (one of my favorite online magazines). Her book didn't disappoint. The poems were somewhat different than the types of poems that are being published by Crawford right now, because the poems in
  The Haunted House are all focused to the same subject: being a preteen/young teen. Because of the subject matter, it is hard not to compare
  The Haunted House with Karyna McGlynn's
  I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems (which is one of my favorite books, period). They both write about their (and my) teen years, but the main difference is Crawford has mostly the lighter side and McGlynn writes about the pitch black side. Both books are great.
  
  Crawford's poems are almost all prose poems, which I think suit her subject matter and writing style. I like the prose poems better than the few poems that she wrote with line breaks.
  
  I like Crawford's titles, just reading them makes me feel nostalgic ("And I Will Always Love You" and "The Cute Beatle"), or made me laugh ("Riding in Cars with Monsters" and "Yum, Poison Apple").
  
  She uses a lot of specific names when she writes, and I feel like these are real stories and real people. Every reader wants to feel like they are watching something real. She has a lot of poems about Emily Dickinson (she is her descendant and also went to school in Amhearst) and talks about her as if she is a friend at school or a cousin around the same age as she is in these poems.
  
  My favorites in this book:
  
  
  Me Without Makeup
  
  
  Valentine's Day
  
  Riding in Cars with Monsters
  
  Under the Evergreens
  
  
  
  
• 
  Kelsey

  This is one of those books that had me cursing under my breath because I wished I had written these gorgeous lines & had these brilliant insights. I confess the subject matter of girlhood and coming of age has a lot to do with it, but the selection of images and the inventive but accurate logic of the poems definitely holds up.
• 
  Brianna

  Marisa Crawford’s poetry, and in particular her first collection The Haunted House, is characterized by its pop culture ephemera, hyperbolic performance of femininity, and subtle subversion of gendered tropes of childhood and adolescence. Crawford’s work is particularly enjoyable because of its tendency to foreground female interaction and female bonds in what appears to be a conscious response to the devaluation and/or complete erasure of female friendship within popular culture narratives.
  
  It is obvious that Crawford does not “hate” girls. Her poems read like the sincerest of love letters to the girls that populate them; she is concerned with documenting what they think and what they feel without derision or irony. In her poem “Deirdre” Crawford writes, "Oh heaven. If heaven had a name, if heaven/ sent a January angel, it would be called Deirdre. If girls woke up/ in fawn spots, wrapped in blankets, it would be called Deirdre." The near reverence with which Crawford treats her subject is replicated in other poems. Crawford has the tendency to take characters or historical figures and re-imagine and re-contextualize them in order to pay homage to them. The Haunted House includes a five part series spread throughout the collection titled “For Cera”, which is addressed to the female triceratops from the animated children’s movies “The Land Before Time.” In the first poem of the series Crawford writes: "This poem is half tribute to the girl/dinosaur in The Land Before Time and half/unrelenting memory. What’s that there on/ your sweater?" Through this series of five poems, Crawford demonstrates her concern with girlhood; Cera may be a fictional dinosaur, but above all else she is a teenage girl, bound by the same insecurities and joys, and it is obvious that the speaker in these poems¾whether an extension of Crawford or not-is deeply enamored with her. This first poem in the series begins, "I’ve hired a choir of beautiful teenaged/ girls to tell our story, Cera, I turned our/ toothbrushes so that the bristles were/ touching." Cera is treated with the same deference as Crawford’s other subjects, and it is this sincerity that makes Crawford’s poetry both enjoyable and surprising. This poetic series also demonstrates the idiosyncratic way in which pop culture enters into Crawford’s poetry; her work is peppered with references to Madonna, Courtney Love, the Guinness Book of World Records, and Wynona Ryder, among others. What would seem gimmicky or forced by a lesser poet is rendered evocative by Crawford.
  
  I absolutely loved this collection and would recommend it to anyone. 10/10.
• 
  Andrea Blythe

  Marissa Crawford presents a collection of prose poems deeply imbued with adolescent girlhood. There's a the same sense mixed of delight and unease and wonder when reading the women of Marissa's poetry, as there would be in encountering a ghost for the first time. Pop culture slips into the poetry as easily as references to Emily Dickenson, who is really a pop culture princess and awkward adolescent herself.
  
  I was continually surprised reading through these poems, first picking them at random, and then starting from the beginning and reading through to the end. The poetry here incorporates simple sentences piled on top of one another into a complex web, which shows how nothing ever goes away, but continues to haunt us. I really, really love this book, and love that I own it and can return to it again and again.
  
  As a final note, I should point out that I am potentially biased here, because I know Marissa personally. We used to work together. Though I'm not prone to raving about something just because my friend did it, I'm mentioning it nevertheless. So, if you don't trust my opinion, you can always read
  this review over at the Examiner.com - San Francisco.
• 
  Serpent

  Re-read this snowy weekend. Poems of 90s suburban girlhood infused with the chemical sweetness and lingering danger of what it meant/means to be a girl. What, in this time in American culture, were the infiltrating influences on budding gender and what does it means to refuse, invoke, and play with those influences? The defined characters who voices ring like a chorus to a catchy pop-song throughout the poems serve as heartfelt guides through their attempts to desperately collapse a stifling suburban setting and bring to light the nefarious shadows in the corners of bedrooms and attics.
  
  
• 
  L.J.

  
  http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-31...#
  
  
• 
  Carrie

  i love this book. i sought it out specifically at awp this past year and marisa was nice enough to sign it for me!