From acclaimed fiction writer and playwright Kate Cayley–poems that illuminate the deep strangeness of the familiar.

In Other Houses, Kate Cayley’s second collection of poetry, objects are alive with the presence of the people who have handled them. Myths and legends are interwoven with daily life. Visionaries, mystics, charlatans, artists, and the dead speak to us like chatty neighbours. An imaginary library catalogues missing people. Reading becomes a way of remembering the dead. Home is an elsewhere we are “called to,” a mystery that impels children to wander off, and adults to grow in unexpected directions.

Cayley couples a rich, meaty lyricism with the intimacy of direct address, creating a poetry that is at once embodied and spectral. She directs us to wonder, “Did light and dark have a taste and texture, like food?” At the same time, her command of voice and narrative is masterful–each of these poems unfolds with the sweep and precision of a compressed novel.

…Walking alone, you come upon a single glove, or shoe, pressed into the light snow.

Or find a handprint on the wrong side of a windowpane.

Or find a collection of marbles, still grouped carefully together in the backyard.

Messages.(from “The Library of the Missing”)

Praise for Other Houses:

“Beware of Kate Cayley. With an agility stolen from some other world she flicks this one open and invites us to watch our certainties scuttling away. Predatory and unsettling, these exquisitely crafted poems suggest that we are at our most human when yearning to reach beyond the visible.” –Martha Baillie

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Otter

Our Backs Warmed by the Sun

Our Days In Vaudeville

Our Extraordinary Monsters

Our Familiar Hunger

Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers

Our Friend Joe

Our Ghosts

Our Gleaming Bones Unrobed

Our Inland Sea

Our Kind of Work

Our Lady of Mile End

Our Land

Our Latest in Folktales

Our Little Secret

our place

Our Revels Now Are Ended

Our Story

Our Twelve Days Before Christmas

Our Words, Our Revolutions