Took House is a disquieting book about intimate relationships and what is seen and hidden. In vulnerable poems of obsession, Camp places motivation deep in the background, following instead a chain reaction between pain and pleasure. Took House navigates a landscape of bone and ash, wine and circumstance. Boundaries shift between reality and allegory. The unknown appears and repeats, eerily echoing need. Blame, power and disorder hover, unsettling what we know of love.

Took House is Lauren Camp’s fifth book of poetry. One Hundred Hungers, Camp’s third book, won the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, Tupelo’s most prestigious poetry prize. Previous books have been shortlisted for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, and the New Mexico- Arizona Book Award. Lauren is a true citizen of the poetry community, giving widely. She teaches young students to understand and embody poems for Poetry Out Loud and offers community workshops and mentoring to elders interested in exploring poetry as a means of self-expression. As a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and keynote speaker at the New Mexico Alzheimer’s Caregiver Conference, she has brought an empathic, artistic perspective to doctors, patients and loved ones by sharing her poems on dementia and its effect on families. Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Slice, DIAGRAM and elsewhere, and many have been translated into Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish and Turkish. She is an emeritus Black Earth Institute fellow and the recipient of numerous residencies. For 15 years, she hosted a popular public radio program, blending contemporary poetry with jazz and global music, bringing unexpected beauty to the airwaves. In her previous incarnation as a visual artist, Lauren made fiber portraits of her favorite musicians, and assembled a solo exhibit called “The Fabric of Jazz,” which traveled to museums in ten U.S. cities. She lives in a cozy household in New Mexico with her husband of 25 years and their elderly cat, Ella. www.laurencamp.com