Nicky Beer’s book of poems, The Diminishing House, is published by Carnegie Mellon University Press (2010).
Praise for The Diminishing House:
“Written with education and enlightenment, The Diminishing House is a cherishable collection.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Nicky Beer’s scrupulous articulations make the most of diminishing things. She names the body electric and sings against our losses and erosions with uncanny verbal precision. This is a shining first book.”
—Edward Hirsch
“What a sober delight it is to read Nicky Beer’s The Diminishing House, whose rooms of poems are generated in loss, but completed in joy…Whatever darkness falls in this book, the poet is given the means and mind to transform it. As Nicky Beer brilliantly puts it: ‘The dark makes you a gap-goer, tether-tongued.’ These are unforgettable poems.”
—Lynne McMahon
“Begin with loss, subtract from it, then start asking questions. Is there a harder charge for a young poet? And yet, here it is, The Diminishing House, and, inside that house, Nicky Beer feeling her way from room to room…through her impeccable eye for detail and her remarkably adaptive poetic gifts, Beer manages to awaken in her readers a great faith in the power of the imagination to transform what it touches, and to call up the only conceivable solution: ‘Love, come kiss me lightly / where I am yoked to a shadow that is not my own.’ Isn’t that why poetry exists?”
—Sherod Santos
