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The Yellow House by Robin Behn
ISBN 978-1-933132-76-1    $14.00 US   |   $16.00 CAN        74 pages





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In the allegorical world of Robin Behn’s marvelous The Yellow House, the landscape and the
characters and the sequence of events enact the very fact and drama of human language and
human voice. Part abstraction, part narration, all lyrically alive, wildly so, in a musical composition
that we don’t want to stop listening to.     Ralph Angel


Poe, Dickinson, Austen, Virginia Woolf imagined a woman inside a house.  Robin Behn imagines
the house inside a woman, a counter feeling that makes a startling new work of art.  The Yellow
House is both an actor and the theater for its own imagining, which is to say these poems come
to life in the deep privacy of a dream and in the spectacle of a thing witnessed like a painting, or
a play, or like the experience of color itself.  Behn gathers the mob of the heart together where
boy, horse, prophet, Other carry their burdens and deliver their “swarm of promises.”  Behn flings
herself into music and in her “constant vectoring” makes contact with the brilliant “yellow fire” of
the mind.    Bruce Smith

I love these poems for their wild imagination, the house as one of the speakers, both whimsical
and deeply intelligent, how they build toward a structure that hovers at their edges like a welcome
ghost.     Lynn Emanuel





Robin Behn

Robin Behn is the author of six collections of poems including Horizon Note and Naked Writing,
and co-editor of The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets who Teach. Recipient of
the Brittingham Prize and AWP Award Series in Poetry Prize, and of fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is on the faculty of the M.F.A. in Creative
Writing Program at The University of Alabama and also teaches for Vermont College of Fine Arts.
She lives with her son in Birmingham, Alabama, and plays flute and penny whistle in the band
Waxwing (www.waxwingband.com).