From accomplished writer Ken Sparling comes a spare verse novel about a girl and a boy and the life they're writing together. But the girl wants a story and the boy wants a poem, and the furniture in the house is stuck in the middle. Meditative and magical, a book as complicated as the ways we love, This Poem Is a House is, in the end, about a girl's story sheltering a boy's poem, the way a house shelters the lives of the people who live in it.

Ken Sparling has written six novels, including Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (Knopf, 1996), commissioned by Gordon Lish. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.