What the Neighbors Know

In these poems, Melanie McCabe traces the disintegration of a marriage and the loss of a house lived in for decades. The poems explore not only the end of a relationship, but also the deep and personal attachment that people form with the home they live in. Here also are poems about a childhood home and of days spent as a young mother in the house that must now be sold. Throughout this profoundly honest collection are love poems-written not only to a husband, but to a parent, a child, and even to a beloved house itself. In the title poem, McCabe alludes to the limited view, the fragmented and incomplete stories our neighbors form as they bear witness to only a part of our lives-and never to the complete truth. Here the reader glimpses that truth, sees beyond the blinds, the closed curtains, to find a woman living a life that many will recognize as their own.