Still House in the Desert: An Eco-Contemplation

Meditations on time, space, and objects in houses, as well as lives of children, mothers, and non-human creatures in domestic spaces

Longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry

Each of Brenda Hillman's books has been transformative for her readers, and her twelfth collection is no exception. Building on previous volumes about seasons, days and minutes, Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-twentieth century. Here, magical poems explore rooms as opportunities for dream, and domestic objects as the dream-shapes where culture and imagination inform each other. In that way, the poet celebrates the layered lives of children and adults, including, strikingly, the life of her mother, a native of Brazil whose presence intimately links the processes of inner vision and daily tasks.

Like Hillman's other pioneering work, these poems are personal and collective; they braid the spiritual, the scientific, the political, and the visionary. Short spare lyrics are placed beside longer pieces; small photos add to the visual structures of the pages. One long prose poem explores the child's neurological anxiety and the awakening of mid-century environmental consciousness, while another is a meditation on women's domestic work with textiles and the rhetoric of literary repetition. The closing sequence gives homage to unlikely intersections of humans with non-human lives, including dust mites, moths, and mycorrhizal roots. This remarkable collection will plunge readers into the mysteries of childhood and of childhood houses everywhere.

[Sample Poem]

The newspaper

Sunlight crosses the room bearing elastic dust motes.

Clouds graze steadily over the house.

Trucks cross the suburbs; they have been cleared for departure.

The mother scours the morning paper for facts
& uplifting stories, laughing--
almost a little snort--
maybe it's disbelief, maybe
it's puffs of air pushed out by her idea of God.

In this line, it's the next century,

in this line the mother & her little laugh are gone,

in this line two ravens eat a carcass in Maryland,

a hurried driver doesn't hit a fawn,

the vote is being tallied, the red seeps across the map

& drips from the thick finger of Florida into a sea
of pre-named storms, & the sea of blood rises,

the small barge carrying corpses of fact & dream,

their bones wrapped together in newsprint.

BRENDA HILLMAN was born in Tucson, Arizona, and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books and is the author of twelve full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022), Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), winner of the Northern California Book Award.

Review Quotes:

"Like the art of living which may also be the art of dying, these capacious and luminous poems toggle between spirit and matter, emptiness and form. Hillman's attention, her eco-contemplation, is a magnificent inventory of survival."--Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude

"To read Hillman is to accompany a witness who does not shy away from the fractures of her time--war, capitalism, environmental collapse, pandemics--but who meets them with forms that reinvent what a poem can be. Her experiments in line, punctuation, and fragmentation are not mere gestures of style; they are acts of attention, evidence of a mind that insists on registering the complexity of being alive now. It is rare to find such a sustained chronicle of the first decades of the new millennium in poetry: a witness to a world at once luminous and precarious. Hillman's work offers courage and lament, solace and resistance. That these poems continue to insist on beauty and care--even in the face of catastrophe--is part of their enduring gift."--Jack Jung

"Still House in the Desert is a masterpiece. Harrowing and delicious and essential. Made of a music that rises and falls, shot through with a melody of mystical longing that returns new again and again like time itself. A writer at the height of her powers. No poet in the language can write a simile--a likeness--like Brenda Hillman. No poet has an imagination so wildly restless and yet so surely grounded. Her gifts are many, her poetry a whole world of feeling and vision."--Jesse Nathan, author of Eggtooth

"Brenda Hillman is writing some of the most vital and necessary poetry today. Still House in the Desert is a remarkable journey that transforms her childhood home into a vivid exploration of seemingly mundane objects, a poetic treatise on time, space, and family. In this poignant elegy, she lovingly renders with wisdom, intimacy, and tenderness the emotional interiority of herself as well as that of her mother whom she mourns. As always, her interrogation of language through self-scrutiny reveals such immense empathy for this universal experience and for her childhood self. These poems remind us of what is inevitable and encourage us to linger in the unique details of our own lives."--Didi Jackson, Napa Valley Writers Conference 2025

"Brenda Hillman has given us an expansive lyric--I want to say epic--of our times. The result: gorgeous and subtle, and the work of a poet at the height of her powers."--Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's, Short Conversations with Poets