Dovetail Down the House cover image

Dovetail Down the House

Kallie Falandays

2016

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Kallie Falandays is the author of Tiny Openings Everywhere (Upper Rubber Boot Books, 2015) and All the Water All the Waves (dancing girl press, 2015). She lives in Philadelphia.

“I like the arrogant flick of love in these words. Tactile, muscled, and angry with desire, these poems reach for you. If you’re alone at the end of this book it’s because you dove from love’s edge and you have chosen your loneliness.”

—Emily Kendal Frey


“Techno-savvy though she is, Kallie Falandays loves paper (references to it frame Dovetail Down the House) but often it’s not poems on paper that remind me of her so much, but artwork: the fantastical, perspective-reorienting work of, say, Escher and Chagall. And from that intriguingly parallel universe, Falandays casts her eye back on our own, investigating the highs and lows of fever-heat passion so intensely, she could blister the wall paint off an Escher house and set Chagall’s winged goats and upside-down cows to dancing their hooves off. Watch out! ‘The wind./Coming to eat you.'”

—Albert Goldbarth


"This book tells me that letters on a page are the ghostly dust of one's own body, 'the opposite side of [one's] skin.' On these pages, an ocean bleeds its rain. On these pages, 'we wolf the burn.' When we flip one particular page's table over, we can naughtily and hauntingly and sadly rub its legs. Dovetail Down the House is an essay on grief (in poems) and a haunted-house-opera (even though the book inquires about 'the opposite of opera') and a making of a lovely-as-lips body out of text, a zombie lover/a window in the mouth. Kallie Falandays writes, 'Your face was dripping in my head all morning' and I think that this is the most perfect articulation of grief and sadness and weight. And like Falandays, I deeply feel 'the sadness of not being able to be nothing' even as I revel in material reality: doorknobs and vampire movies and bedsheets and how 'everyone everywhere is twirling their hair.'"

—Olivia Cronk