About the Book
WINNER OF THE 2023 JOHN GLASSCO PRIZE FOR LITERARY TRANSLATION
FINALIST FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR LITERARY TRANSLATION
A meditation on the wiles of depression, illuminated by queer and diasporic experience.
"We, nosotros, nosotras: somos sobrevivientes." Weaving prose poetry, essay, autobiography and photography in mutual contamination, Nicholas Dawson relates his own deep depression, a state never fully gone, always cohabitant. Amidst this persistence, "the body and the pen bring a plural syntax of alternative knowledges into being, one which allows us to know the world better, to know ourselves better, to better love daybreak and this sun obstinately piercing the curtain with its brazen rays."
House Within a House, in a luminous translation by D.M. Bradford, tells the story of what walls the depressed person in, what keeps them wandering inside, and what finally gets them, somehow, out of the house. The original book, Désormais, ma demeure, received the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal.
About the Author :
Born in Chile and based in Montréal, Nicholas Dawson is a writer, scholar, and the Literary Director of Éditions Triptyque. He is the author of La déposition des chemins (La Peuplade, 2010), Animitas (La Mèche, 2017), and Désormais, ma demeure (Triptyque, 2020), for which he received the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the Blue Metropolis Diversity Prize. He is also the co-author of Nous sommes un continent. Correspondance mestiza (Triptyque, 2021, with Karine Rosso), and the editor of many anthologies.
Darby Minott Bradford is a poet, translator, and editor based in Tio'tia: ke (Verdun). His first book, Dream of No One but Myself, was a finalist for the Gerard Lampert Memorial Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His forthcoming collection, Bottom Rail on Top, will be published in 2023. House Within a House is his first book-length translation.
Review :
"Nicholas Dawson's lyric memoir, House Within a House, unfurls into stirring prose poems that capture the author's experience of depression"--Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation
"Nicholas Dawson's House Within a House is about the creative process and all the anguish and hard-fought joy that surrounds it. This book, which so expertly employs philosophical, memoiristic, and visual modes, is deeply human; it seeks to affirm in all of us the part of our personhood that waits for us 'on the other side of depression'--a task as urgent as any in our current moment. This book will mean a lot to a whole range of readers."--Billy-Ray Belcourt
"The searching, confessional, and deeply intelligent voice of House Within a House is a flashlight beam that takes the reader into and through the territory of a depression--but this light lingers, so that at the book's close we are left with the glow of language naming the overlooked, blinking at its cumulative power."--Sadiqa de Meijer
"I love this book because I know what it's like to dwell in the house of depression and how hard it can be to communicate the experience. Nicholas Dawson uses his poetic creativity to describe the house within a house -- both the prison of the mind and the look and feel of rugs, floorboards, chair legs, and windowsills. His words and pictures make the dark corners and impasses a little less lonely. And chart paths for getting out of the house."--Ann Cvetkovich
"Bradford's translation is pretty close to perfect: from the demeure to the house nothing is lost, even as the English finds its own voice in Bradford."--Katia Grubisic, Vallum Magazine
"D.M. Bradford's first full-length translation, House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson, is a dazzling and multilingual success. A translation from French to English, but maintaining the original Spanish phrases that appear throughout the text, the work is a meditation on the mediation of language."--Salena Wiener, Montreal Review of Books
