Words for House Story
celebrates the house of our longings, our memory and our hopes. That house is filled
with real people, imperfect, living among frogs, herons, and muskrats, watching the moon and stars, not for a sign, but as emblems of what we are: watchers together. The poems are taut, poignant with love, the raw trouble of love and of families. They go unflinchingly into the hollows and find all the light that’s filtering in. —Fleda Brown, author of No Need of Sympathy
Words for House Story featured in Best Books of 2015 at Beltway Poetry
as a Best-Dressed book at The WARDROBE
read more poems The Swing
Death among the Thistles
—wood engraving by Leonard Baskin
Out here in this leggy light
the real is trashy, luminous
altogether arbitrary
like the moon a collision
threw at our meaning
of beauty, sinking
like the face of a love one
whose dark secret bristles
temper November
a shade of purple I can only call
a truce with the sky
and its endless ghosts
–Featured at VERSE DAILY. Read four more poems from this book featured October 2015 at The Wardrobe’s “BEST DRESSED” book blog.
Balingit’s poems capture what it’s like to be outside in nature, and what it’s like to be vulnerable, to love, to fear—to be fully human. Her craft both sings and is as precise as a diamond cutter’s. One gasps over and over at where each poem goes, through humor, heartbreak and startling observation. The surprises here are many. One comes away with a sense of gratitude and wonder at what writing can do. —Alice Elliott Dark, author of In the Gloaming
Reviews of Words for House Story at goodreads. 
Thanks for your support! –JoAnn
Purchase this book at
Newark Arts Alliance gallery shop | Acorn Books | The Delaware Contemporary Bookstores, order Words for House Story through Ingram distributors. Available online through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Published by WordTech Editions. ISBN 978-1625490285. Softcover, 6×9, 80 pages. Cover artwork: Jesús & Joan by Ananda Balingit-LeFils.