Donna Langevin’s House of Poems is more a vast estate than a single cottage, and her poetry easily moves in and out of both. Art works on the wall, the inner city at her door. She populates the house with Susanna Moodie, the face of urban homelessness, neighbours who engender a “murderous wish/black as the moon’s dark side” and the drama of families and friends in rooms full of memories. Her imagination, like her language, is rooted in the everyday, and the minutiae of human experience that drives it gives these poems “new lenses” for the miracle of memory she conjures. Her poems are, indeed, “hymns to the heavens,” studded with Langevin’s unique constellation of imagery and diction.
— Antony Di Nardo, author of forget.sadness.grass
and Through Yonder Window Breaks