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

The Blue Spotted Salamander

Your Heart and How It Works

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 | Hockessin Bookshelf |  The DE Contemporary  Bookstores, order Words for House Story through Ingram distributors. Available online through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.