Veronica Tucker

I almost never trust a first draft. Not because I think it's bad. More often, it's because I can't yet tell what it's trying to become. The first version usually arrives tangled up with everything I thought I wanted to say. It carries too much explanation, too many beautiful sentences I admire more than I should, too much of my own insistence that the reader understand exactly what I mean. For a long time, I thought revision meant making something better by adding to it. Another paragraph....

While I was writing The House as Witness, I thought I was building a book. I didn't realize I was building something that would eventually belong to other people. The poems came together slowly. Some were written after long shifts in the emergency department. Others found their way onto the page while I was traveling, or in the quiet hour before the rest of my family woke up. I revised them over months, sometimes years, never quite sure they belonged together until, one day, they did. When...

When I first began writing the poems that would become The House as Witness , I did not know I was building a book. I thought I was simply paying attention to the place where my life unfolds. The house had become a quiet partner in my days, a structure that absorbed every season of motherhood, every shift in routine, every joy and every sorrow. I began to realize that the house was not only where my life happened, but also a presence with its own memory. It seemed to listen. It seemed to...