Whose House, Whose Playroom | Virginia Smith Rice

Whose House, Whose Playroom is a chapbook to savor. Each poem invites you into rooms with cloved oranges, mirrors, and “cupsful of evening” through voices that compel you to think about what it means to really look—inward at the self, and outward at the world as it moves through time. Virginia Smith Rice’s poems sing with wonderfully compelling, compassionate, and lyrical tonalities that pull you into the “raven-flamed hours” of memory. Whose House, Whose Playroom presents an aesthetic of liminal spaces—of being, of memory, of the relationships between mother and child—all the while in rich dialogue with the poems of Plath, Bishop, Levis, and Vallejo. This chapbook is filled with light in its exploration of darkness, and grace moves through these lines. As the speaker says in “Imagine Us Then, Unseeing Them,”And yes, we all haveour sadnesses, not all of them so innocent,but this hidden (forgotten) one is pureloss, filling childhood with unnamed ache.This (alone) cannot save us.- Tyler