Model Home: Poems by Eve F. W. Linn

“Model Home inhabits womanhood from all angles—the performative, the domestic, the bodily, and the maternal. In these concise poems, language tightens as the subjects multiply into a kaleidoscope of daughter, mother, self, and their overlapping wilderness. . . . Linn has created a collection where the ‘stand-ins/for what really happened’ are but preparation for the real-life after birth and acrobatics—for the truths we only know because around them ‘mother circled, saying nothing.’”

—Allison Pitinii Davis, author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk

“In these poems, knowledge often comes from a gaze—one that discovers and uncovers beauty in the natural world, truth in the human. Each line is sculpted, each poem a concentration of precise imagery and surprising turns of phrase, and the pleasure for the reader is continuous, mysterious, and always layered, as the speaker observes, concedes, and puts faith in, an errant beauty. Even within the confines of a so-called model home, the poet offers transcendence; even in the disappointments of humanity, this ‘scribe of battered stars’ offers us transformation.”

—Joan Houlihan, author of Shadow-feast

“Eve F. W. Linn’s ‘model home’ is not the one your realtor will show you. Linn’s is located at the edge of the unconscious, somewhere on the solid side of the border of dream. It is often a mysterious and precarious place, one where a child watches her mother rise naked from a bath and thinks of a ‘spiral of honey bees’ rising in a ‘domed glass bottle.’ . . . Eve Linn’s real ‘model home’ is poetry itself, and she shows us how this art of words can sometimes give us shelter from the storm.

—Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said

“‘To become a bird is not so easy’ Eve Linn writes, and yet this collection of lyric poems soars. Here are perfectly honed brief lyrics of a lifetime, exquisite in sound and image—their brevity belying their depth. Linn, ‘the scribe of battered stars’ is fearless in her pursuit of life’s layered meanings, seeing undaunted through ‘the scrim of leaves,’ through the lens and scope of her art.”

— Jane Seitel, founder of QuillsEdge Press