Dwellers in the House of the Lord

By Wesley McNair

A New England Book Award Finalist. “There's so much life in this beautiful book that it feels like a living thing. Wesley McNair is a kind of Chekhov of American poetry.”—Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize winner and Poet Laureate.

Wesley McNair is a poet, memorist, and storyteller. His stories are personal and yet speak to our most urgent, universal, concerns. As he writes...

For we are all born into exile, saved only by the homes
we dream, and the love that we may find there.

Set in rural Virginia, the poet’s younger sister Aimee is adrift in a difficult marriage to Mike, a Trump-supporting, church-going, off-the-grid gun shop owner. McNair brilliantly explores his sister’s life, his own family’s past, to seek understanding. Throughout, this marvelous work, McNair attests to patience and perseverance, and an unwavering belief in compassion and reconciliation, in love’s ability to unite us, even amidst the ugly politics of our time.

Dwellers in the House of the Lord is for anyone who loves poetry’s unique power, in the hands of a master, to tell stories of our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781567926705

Wesley McNair

Wesley McNair is the author of more than twenty books, including the recent poetry collections Dwellers in the House of the Lord and The Lost Child: Ozark Poems, winner of the PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Poetry. He has been awarded, amongst other prizes, the Robert Frost Prize, the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal for distinguished contribution to the world of letters. McNair served as Maine Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2016.

Book preview

Part I

1 •

Inside the box she sent is bubble wrap

folded over and over around

a thick envelope, awkwardly folded,

and deeper down, wrapped

in Christmas paper with my name

on top in a blur of letters

handwritten over and over,

my younger sister Aimee’s late gift,

sealed in an old plastic bag

like a secret she wants only me

to know: a silver charm bracelet,

which in the winter light of my kitchen,

dangles a palace, a running horse,

a heart with a key, and a clock.

Once, after returning from a long visit

with our mother, Aimee, married

with two daughters, hid under her bed,

keeping herself a secret. Mike searched

and called for hours before she called back

at last and he found her, discovering also

his unshakable, lifelong anger at the woman

my sister had tried to put out of her mind.

But Mike was her replacement

for my mother.

A mind has so much to keep track of:

which secrets to share,

which to guard from others,

and now, who and where anyone

is anymore. In Aimee’s letter—

creased and re-creased from

her underlining and afterthoughts

in the margins—she asks me to mail

her Christmas cards for my children,

having forgotten their addresses

and their names. They can’t hear

my chattering, she writes,

but can read of several things

I wanted to write inside the card itself.

The Lord loves you, she remembers

on the back, where a single heart

floats in a blank sky.

2 •

In the famous family photograph,

Aimee sits on the couch beside Mike

in his Navy uniform, holding his hand

and looking up at him with the defenseless

wonder she wore all though girlhood.

Eight years old, she has just asked him

to marry her. Nobody would have guessed

he would come back later to do it,

or that he would take her to live with him

north of a Navy base in rural Virginia,

his smiling, clean-shaven face now

overgrown by an unkempt, anti-social beard.

Outside the back window

of Aimee’s second house

from the time they moved in,

the high, dangling chains

and gambrel stick

of a deer-slaughtering station.

In