Something in the Potato Room

In the dark alcove of the potato room, the unexpected blooms. The surrealistic imagery in this strange little book takes the reader on an otherworldly descent where pores open like baby mouths, bones flower, and even the Real is eerily surrealized when the narrator confronts death in the mundane of the supermarket.

This poet’s forceful, startling syntax lends to the kind of Japanese-horror film aesthetic where things just “are:” unexamined, unexplained and we must simply accept them in all their dreadful wonder. The random fascination in antique medical apparati, a Foucauldian rigor, the occasional Absolute, combined with an unfussy flow of bare, vertebral prose and a bizarrely twisted narrative make for an engaging read.

-- Kore Press

Buy the book here.

Read reviews of the book here and here.


Listen to a podcast interview about the book with the editors of Straylight here.


And a reading from the book is available at Apostrophe Cast. 

Sparse and stunning, this addictive cinema unwinds with lyrical and dramatic certainty.  I thank the poet for twisting my perspective and shoving me outside my comfort zone, for showing me how poems can enter the body and take root.

                        -- Patricia Smith

Heather Cousins’s poems open up before your eyes like a reversible metamorphosis; from cocoon to butterfly, and back again. The “something” in the potato room is a mystery meant to be witnessed, and even experienced, but never fully revealed; it is the artistic process itself.  The poems in Something in the Potato Room are genuinely exciting because they are both fanciful and menacing. The strange pairing of the quotidian with the macabre functions to reveal, within the realm of the unconscious, where the raw material of poetry is to be found: it is “…a low-ceilinged room, with small/windows: half-ground, half-sky.” You will be surprised by what is buried there.

                           -- Judith Ortiz Cofer

Under the stairs, part tomb, part womb.  Among “Earwigs.  Sacking,” the muted heart grows “pink and full of skin.”  But this is more ethnography than tale of love; more explorer’s diary.  The explorer, a domestic time-traveler, a workaday misfit.  The data, precise, but never quantifiable.  From the “milky bends” in the laminated library card to the warm burst of a wakening mandible, Heather Cousins’s Something in the Potato Room measures twice and cuts quick.

                          -- Danielle Pafunda

 

 Heather Cousins’s book is a pearl of bone.  This slender portrait illuminates a small and dusty life through a crack in a floorboard.  Cousins’s fine shifts of language carve out in precision a woman’s desire for change—a desire that results in a most tender and disturbed conflation of death, birth, and abandonment.  This book is a rare piece of silverware, and it will cut you, and you will make precious the scar.

                            -- Kirsten Kaschock