The house is still standing is peopled with charlatans, gingerbread men, children and savants — the thousands and the particular. Within Adrienne Barrett’s nimbly built first collection, poems deke and swerve, from the wry to the theatrical to the intimate.

Whether riffing on the secret identities of public intellectuals and pop icons or penning elegiac verse, Barrett’s voice is strong, anchored and inviting. Although she takes her readers through both “substance / and its downfall,” in the end, the structure is sound; she is holding it up.

“With exhilarating shifts in perception and a casually eccentric diction that, like a Fred Astaire dance, is ‘ever so slightly off time,’ Adrienne Barrett’s poems reveal that reality is a good deal weirder and more complicated than we might care to admit. At any second, the everyday might explode in a “Little Hiroshima” of tragedy or wonder. ‘There’s terror in it’ and moments of grace, too — what we used to call the sublime.This is poetry that ‘rolls without warning.’ The house is still standing announces that a fully formed and authentic talent has arrived.”
“Adrienne Barrett’s curiosity leads her in many directions: unsteady truths, lives of eccentric others, childhood experience that can mar or determine, or shift forward — as memory — into adulthood. With imagery that is at times intense, at times ferocious and humorous, Barrett refuses to look away or turn aside. This is the observant self, probing.”