Finalist for the 2015 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the Archibald
Lampman Award, City of Ottawa Book Awards and the ReLit Award

A book of dark corners and shifting locations, full of switches that light up
the unobvious places, elsewhere in the house.

House Dreams, Deanna Young’s haunted and haunting third collection, is at once a core sample of the life we all live underground, and a view beneath the foundations of the various eras and places that make up one woman’s life story. These poems have the plainspoken power, surreal shifting, uncanny logic and transformed everyday imagery of our most numinous dreams. It’s as if Jung’s assertion that “[w]hen an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate,” is taken up here as a reading guide back through time.

Thunder over the Minas Basin.
For days it’s been wrestling with the mountain gods
and still no rain. You walk the perimeter of the house,
sniffing the air like an animal—the erotic fields.
Around again, acknowledging each of its many doors
with a nod. To you they’re human. Like you,
the windows cannot believe
this is happening.

—from “The Path”