The Good House & The Bad House by Doe Parker
The Good House & The Bad House is a long-poem and essay using graphics and text to explore place-memory, factual metaphor, the after-effects of multi-generational conflicts, and transness. These themes are continuously in need of the house as their setting, bringing forgiveness to the merging of multiple selves which are stationed simultaneously in memory and the present.
"In this unforgettable book, Doe Parker inhabits the evolution of a complexly gendered life, its portents, and its obstacles by ringing changes on emotionally resonant loop-de-loops in time. Parker shows how physical spaces which formed key parts of a self can traumatize, but can also be processed differently by revisiting them. The spell cast by The Good House & The Bad House might just be a new and wonderful kind of realism, the way it juxtaposes architectural plans with dreams, precisely detailed memories with surreal portents, and a past-self with a present-self, while acknowledging all of their potential continuities. This powerful book shows us how identity and gender can be all at once spatial, luminous, and heartbreaking.” — Trace Peterson, co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics
“Beginning with the linked tasks of observation and memory, The Good House & The Bad House moves with deft clarity through something like autobiography, putting fact and fantasy in startling relation to one another. An exciting voice, a formal disruption, a text built of generosity — read this book and keep reading it.” — T. Clutch Fleischmann, author of Syzygy, Beauty, and Time Is The Thing a Body Moves Through, forthcoming from Coffee House Press in Spring 2019
“The poems in The Good House & The Bad House pull us by the collar into the house of the body and invites us in to stay awhile, get uncomfortable. The result is a collection that will either feel entirely too close — or nothing akin — to home: a blueprint for the portability of memory and a stunning calculation of what becomes possible when all bets are off. Parker’s line is a generous hand extended and we are lucky to be reaching back.” — Meg Day, author of Last Psalm at Sea Level
Doe Parker is a trans poet/essayist from the Bay Area currently based out of Chicago. He has a B.A. in poetry from Columbia College Chicago, and has work published or forthcoming in Habitat Lit Magazine, Pine Hills Review, Sink Hollow Literary Journal, Hooligan Magazine, No Assholes Lit Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, Callosum Magazine, and EOAGH. He has a pet snake, loves bookbinding and plans to spend the next year working on a new manuscript, Vestibule. You can keep up with him on Instagram @doe.parker.
Poetry by Doe Parker. Graphics by Art Zarko. Cover illustration by Alyssa Zhan. Edited by Terra Oliveira. Author photo by Em Dubin from the Hooligan Magazine Four Year Art Collective. 47 pages. Black & White. Published by Recenter Press in April 2018.
Press:
Crab Fat Magazine (Review)
Tupelo Quarterly (Review)
Maudlin House (Interview)
Recenter Press (Interview)
The American Poetry Journal (Favorite Books)
Anomaly (Favorite Books)
Pine Hills Review (Excerpts)
Callosum Magazine (Excerpts)