Cover Reveal: House of Myth and Necessity by Jennifer A Sutherland

We are over the moon to welcome our first returning author back to River River Books: Jennifer A Sutherland, with House of Myth and Necessity. Jennifer’s second collection blows us away in similar ways to her collection Bullet Points, full of linguistic surprise, agility with history and literature, deep music and emotions. (And math? And law? And Greek tragedy?!) We fell in love immediately, and cannot wait for you to read this incredible collection, which you can now preorder (shipping in February)! We also invite you to read the collection’s opening poem “Alcestis as Res Ipsa” below, and blurbs by authors Moira Egan, Lynn Melnick, Amanda Newell, and Donna Vorreyer.

Jennifer A Sutherland is a poet, essayist, and attorney in Baltimore. She is the author of the lyric-hybrid, book-length poem Bullet Points, also from River River Books (2023). Her work has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Cagibi, EPOCH, and elsewhere.

More about the collection: Jennifer A Sutherland’s second poetry collection, House of Myth and Necessity, throws open the shutters of language as it is built around the concepts of girlhood, marriage, myth, and law. In the company of the figure of Euripedes’ Alcestis, the poems move through houses of memory, domestic violence and divorce, cross examinations, and the Fibonacci sequence. As the collection’s narrative considers love and suburban scenes, Alcestis—posed as an affidavit, as a gothic disposition on an autumn afternoon, as modern love, as elegant proof, as beads on an abacus string—changes, the idea of her walking across a stage, speaking her lines. It is then the reader discovers that they have also changed through the poems’ deliberations, questionings, and the human need to stand before a court or audience and speak the self’s story. A brilliant voice in American poetry, Sutherland, poet and attorney, draws her reader into the retelling of a woman’s difficult moral choice in myth, astounding in both its timelessness and its originality.

Preorder House of Myth and Necessity today! And thank you for supporting small presses, where literature and poetry truly live. Our books are not small—they are MIGHTY. <3

Han & Amorak

River River Books