The Black House

Author: Bianca Stone

Publisher: Foundlings Press (2023)

Bianca Stone’s chapbook of intimate, searching and darkly humorous prose poems moves amidst the unconscious manifesting in the external world, the reconciliation of the conscious self and the symbolic significance behind our symptoms. Rather than attending to the details of empirical events, these poems tap into universal forms of the psyche and the understanding that our symptoms are often wounds to which we love and tend.

Through the use of epistolary address as well as a rogue self-case history, this chapbook depicts the sometimes-voice of a “commander-in-chief” in an inverted office: The Black House, run by a flawed executive leader of one’s own life. Drawing from psychological, poetic and phenomenological traditions via the works of Freud, Jung, Deleuze and Bachelard (among others), these poems examine love and desire, self and other, metaphor and transference as paradoxical phenomena that express the manifold of our experience.