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Broken Houses
Poems
Chelsea Rathburn (Author)
9780807187272
Paperback / softback, published 29 July 2026
86 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.5 cm, 0.146 kg
"Here is a book that makes me want to believe in ghosts. Chelsea Rathburn is a medium in Broken Houses, able to traverse between the hauntings of both past and future, to summon an Otherworld between these pages. Rathburn digs down to the limestone bedrock of a Florida childhood marked by negotiations of history, class, and family, to ask what—if anything—sprouts from such hard ground? Across four books, Rathburn has proven herself one of the most astute poets of a generation—someone who is able to see clearly the invisible ties between the personal and political—who can juxtapose the large and violent narrative of John Sewell clearing a Tequesta burial mound against the small and quiet terror of a girl left to reckon with ghosts alone. Rathburn wrecks us open, and God, are we better for the wounding." - Diamond Forde "This is profoundly precise poetry: there is never an errant word, and the observations are keenly particular to their people and places. Yet the poems are like locksmiths that can open doors to anyone's contemplations of brokenness, belonging, and beyond. Rathburn has the power to demolish banal ideas about home and expose the unfillable gaps in what we can know of even our own families. She also has the grace to build back poems that are shelters for love and its artful expressions." - Rose McLarney
Winner of the 2026 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award
In Broken Houses, her fourth collection of poetry, Chelsea Rathburn offers a powerful meditation on home and the foundations—both physical and metaphorical, stable and unstable—that shape us. Drawing upon historical records, contemporary art, family photographs, and memory, Rathburn explores the settlement of the city of Miami, as well as her father's placement in a California foster home, to tell larger stories of dispossession and erasure.
At a time when the American Dream seems all the more unreachable, the poems in Broken Houses urge us to hold tight to one another and build connections where we can.