House of Music, is a graceful, wise and meditative first book by Suzanne Swanson. Swanson's poems have appeared in several literary journals and in the collaborative chapbook titled, The Part of Us That Craved the World. A psychologist specializing in pregnancy and postpartum, and a mother of three, she lives, works, and walks in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Praise for House of Music

I had such a strong response to these poems—hearing voices ("I want her to never die"), wanting to tear out pages and put them in envelopes to certain friends and family, slapping my hand down on the book to keep an exquisite phrase where it was so it wouldn't intrude into the next poem. What Swanson calls her "little enlightenments" are hugely entrancing. Readers will yearn for access to this world where wedding dresses sigh and girls on two-wheelers ride into rainstorms like Valkyries. Her poems accept death as inevitably as punctuation, yet fill our perception of the daily round with bunches of fresh exclamation.
—Nor Hall, author of Irons in the Fire (Station Hill Press, 2002)

In the signature poems of House of Music, poems like the wonderful title poem, Suzanne Swanson writes landscapes of the heart, mind, and body that—no matter what their subject matter—have an undertone that is at once confident and dreamlike. These poems feel like visitations and manifest themselves as gifts: underneath everything else, they seem to say, our lives really are houses for music. Because the poems are hard-won, the gift feels real.

Life's difficulties are acknowledged and more than acknowledged in these poems, but their feeling of astonished gratitude is what I most appreciate. I find myself returning to them, as if perhaps I somehow got it wrong: but, no, these poems are very much for real and wills stay right where they are, to be returned to again and again.
—Jim Moore, author of Lightning at Dinner (Graywolf Press, 2005)

Suzanne Swanson is a good listener. She hears "Mozart sparkling," as well as hidden music—"the flute no one was playing." She understands the soul of cellos, accordions, John Renbourn, Frank Zappa. Her ear follows her heart. Her poems move effortlessly between meditation and song.
—Elaine Equi, author of The Cloud of Knowable Things (Coffee House Press, 2003)