In This House - Softcover

"Howard Altmann interrogates the sky, the light, the world, about their intentions. If he seldom finds reassuring answers, he finds something better: 'When all that consoled consoles no longer / loneliness finds a room inside the one it knows.' These poems are as essential as a glass of water."—John Ashbery

"Though not exactly a nature poet, Howard Altmann is a poet of his own mysterious kingdom, 'a house' in which he has built a house, whose walls are open to the inspiration of air. ('Frightened of the next life / being exactly like this life / he asked to be a bird' or 'Let it not be words / you reach for you say— / where the trees stand / far from men'). To have discovered this kingdom and inhabited it (like Keats' Imagination, as monk to monastery)—to have found words for what is nearly unsayable—is a measure of this poet's uncanny transformational gift. Enter the house of these poems and stay on, a grateful tenant in this remarkable state of wonder."—Carol Muske-Dukes

"Howard Altmann has found a way to make language transform itself. If the elusive moment between I and Thou could speak, it might be one of his quietly amazing lines—'you ask the silence to invert itself / like a gymnast in the dark . . . ' Without a trace of rhetoric, In This House reminds us of the power of poetry: to show us how to live in a world in which we are strangers. It's a thrill to come close to such an original and deeply realized art."—Dennis Nurkse

Howard Altmann lives in New York City but he was born and raised in Montreal, Canada, where he graduated from McGill University. He received his MBA from Stanford University and worked as senior vice president of a real estate investment company. He has taught poetry at a women's prison in Manhattan, and he has written children's stories and plays. He is the author of The Johnsons and The Thompsons, which was published by Playscripts, Inc., in 2008. Poems from In This House have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, New England Review, and Open City.