Against the backdrop of small towns built atop schist and granite, surrounded by violently cold, blue-gray Atlantic waters, Casey Lynn Roland’s If the House is Inclined to Collapse offers poems that are both deeply personal and all too universal.
After a messy struggle to reconcile witnessing loved ones’ battles with illness followed by their subsequent deaths, Roland fought through addiction to recovery, and with this collection offers a nod to a more hopeful future. And while the loss and toil behind many of these poems are not unique, they supply different considerations for their outcomes–what if, after the intensity of pain, we learn to embrace the stark contrast of the intense beauty that comes next?
In many ways, these poems are also a love letter to New England–its grit, its rough edges that both harden and heal. Roland illustrates how the Northeast gets under your skin, and these poems only begin to peel back the layers, revealing hurt and joy in equal measure.
Casey Lynn Roland’s poems manage to be intimate and revealing without having to give away what should not be given away. Something that was hidden in plain sight is suddenly made visible—nonetheless, a mystery continues to circulate below the surface. The inflections here sound plaintive, amused, querulous, accepting, insistent, but none of these tones is final or definitive. Roland’s poems stick with you—they find a place in your soul, and in that way they are quite purposefully portable. You will carry them with you, dear reader. Lucky you! They travel well, and they are built for the long haul.
David Rivard, Some of You Will Know
In her debut collection, If the House is Inclined to Collapse, Casey Lynn Roland takes us on a tour of Massachusetts’s North Shore, a landscape scarred by addiction. This is Roland’s “coil-chained city,” where a hard-earned sobriety is reflected in the light cast over this cold and rocky coastline, where “The Atlantic believes only in beginnings.” I know this landscape all too well, and as I read this achingly beautiful account, found myself looking up and away, remembering, walking that first day of recovery, which is “every day. / A space filled with nothing . . . still a space / and still full.” If the House is Inclined to Collapse transcends its pages as “the blue tinge of night drips onto us,” and the dawn “could last forever.”
Jennifer Martelli, Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree
Casey Roland is a poet with a vision of what it is to be a person who lives by poetry and works without myth in a mythologized landscape like her coastal towns north of Boston, the North Shore. She finds strength and loneliness in the hard-won ability to see the conditional fragmentary control and tragic possibility of the clause as well as the terns and gulls and sunlight. Her poems are kindred landscapes, sharp, real, twisty, metaphorical as well as real, and surprising.
David Blair, Barbarian Seasons
It is a rare thing to deeply know a place and to be able to articulate it. Casey Lynn Roland knows the North Shore of Massachusetts, its houses and beaches, the way it feels to drive through the downtown at 2 a.m., the lure of the highway and the surf. She writes unironically about family ties and traditions, and with haunting reserve about addiction. These spare, atmospheric poems acknowledge how much our surroundings define us, how they reflect our loves and struggles. If the House is Inclined to Collapse is both profoundly personal and an important contribution to the literature of the North Shore.
J.D. Scrimgeour, Poet Laureate of Salem, Massachusetts
Casey Lynn Roland
Born and raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts, Casey Lynn Roland grew up roaming all over New England. She is, at heart, a storyteller who spends her time drawing and painting, writing, and generally just making. Her work has previously appeared in The Bookends Review, Harpur Palate, Rougarou Journal, and West Trade Review among others. She holds a BA/MA/MAT in English from Salem State University as well as an MFA in Writing from the University of New Hampshire. She lives with one parakeet, two dogs, and several very particular house plants.