The poems in "Between the Houses" by Margot Fortunato Galt describe dreamlike, surreal spaces in her Twin Cities neighborhood, inspired by Delor Erickson’s paintings. These poems run like a motif through the book, suggesting the play between dream and reality, families and regions, travel and home, art and life.

In Galt’s poems, the “old architecture of desire” builds back to a South Carolina childhood where racism tilted against her desire to be pretty, her desire to erase segregation. In her own “convenient house of horrors” she raised a daughter, who bent on her tender teenage stalk, but, younger, admonished her mother, “You always know, you never let me wonder.” In the play between art and life, Galt interrogates Italian painter Artemesia Gentileschi and her painterly beheadings of many men; Florence Nightingale and her demonic collapse after nursing soldiers wounded in the Crimean. Galt’s exaggerated family differences--North Dakota German pioneers versus Pittsburgh Italian Protestants--send her poems into pathos, querying her aged grandfather about why he left Italy, and ironic challenge of the German “math whiz” who broke the spine of the frontier into his cash register. In these poems her artistic rhythm--red, dark window, word, hand, heart--flowers into reconciliation where “blame falls away like a heavy cloak” to grace the ground we walk upon. 

With poems collected in five anthologies and many others published in journals and magazines, Margot Fortunato Galt’s poetic artistry reaches fruition in this gathering of a keen eye and searching heart. Her poems have received recognition in the Bordighera Poetry Contest and the Spoon River Poetry contest. Awards and grants have come to her work from The Loft, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Center for Arts Criticism, The Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota Historical Society and the Minnesota Humanities Commission. Two of her five other books have been nominated for the Minnesota Book Awards. These publications include The Story in History: Writing Your Way into the American Experience (New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1992), books for young readers on women’s baseball and Vietnam war resistance, and an oral history memoir of Ojibway artist George Morrison, Turning the Feather Around (1998). With degrees from Goucher College, Columbia University in New York and the University of Minnesota, Galt teaches in the graduate school at Hamline University, St. Paul, and in the Minnesota writers-in-the-schools program.