Keeping Room (Ann E. Wallace)

Reviewed by Lynne Shapiro

Content Warning: Misogyny, anti-Semitism, violence

The 24th poet laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, in a New York Times interview, said: “The beautiful thing about poetry is that it just moves one poem at a time.” True. But when a reader meets an artfully assembled collection of poems, an accumulative magic takes place. Ann Wallace’s rich new poetry book, Keeping Room, engages the reader long after the final page.

Reading Wallace’s book evoked my experience at a retrospective of Fairfield Porter’s paintings. Moving through the exhibit, I pieced together domestic interiors and landscapes to recognize Porter as a person, not only a painter. Similarly, Wallace’s poems offer insight into a consciously lived life, one shown from multiple angles, over time, and shaped by both tension and care and, most importantly, balance.

The book’s title refers to the hearth room—the warmest part of the house, traditionally near the fireplace—where, since colonial times, families have gathered to sew, read, play and talk. The centrality of home in Wallace’s work, and its relationship to the larger world, called to mind Yi-Fu Tuan’s book Cosmos & Hearth. Wallace likewise explores the balance between the domestic and the worldly. Home—both shelter and vantage point—becomes a site of reflection, opening outward from the interior space to the urban garden just beyond the window, and further still into the wider world.

The book’s three untitled sections beautifully juxtapose interior and exterior and anxiety and hope with humanity and grace.

The first section is strung through with five “nightmare” poems. The first, “Nightmare with Hypoxia,” refers to dreams shaped by a lack of oxygen and alludes to Wallace’s early ovarian cancer, multiple sclerosis, and long COVID, a condition that also affects her two daughters. The section’s closing poem, “Another Nightmare,” captures the undercurrent of fear that accompanies caring for those we love, evoking the fragility of life amid emergency rooms and pandemics:

The viral barrage goes on
night after night —
storm waters rise
high and higher,
the city sinks away,
my solitary house
grows tall, sprouts
new floors
above the floods.

I climb up, up,
up to safety,
hurry against the water
always seeping in…

The preceding poem, “Breakfast, Compromised,” offers a tonal counterpoint, exemplifying the real-life balance within each section.

Chef Alice Waters does not share
her breakfast secrets, but as I whisk

cream of wheat into simmering milk,
I think of her kitchen, warm with copper

and wood, where slow and simple reign.

The second section opens with a visit to Emily Dickinson’s garden (“The kousa dogwood, alone/and small, arches its branches”) and moves into reflections on spring (“As showy as it is, April is a trash month”). We encounter Alice Waters again (“inviting me into her warm kitchen, to select greens”) and follow Wallace into her own garden, inhabited by birds, a stray cat, and raccoons—all vulnerable to the pressures of mindless gentrification. The balance established in the first section continues, but here the poems reach further outward. In “How to Handle a Leak,” musings about a leaky old house segue into a mediation of the fragility of women’s freedom in these political times, and “The Day After Another Gun Law is Repealed” addresses the painful reality of gun violence in an America by making us aware of how we often look away. “Love Note,” though, celebrates a small tenderness worth recalling:

I did not see the granola bar until I was at work,
rummaging through my bag for lipstick

or a tissue.  My daughter must have slipped it
into my purse as I hurried to make lunches

brush snarled hair, secure small feet into shoes,
zip stubborn jackets, grab my brimming bags

and theirs, in the harried moments before
herding us all out the door,

The small pink Post-it poked from inside
My leather bag, pasted onto the foil wrapper,

Reminding me in the wobbly letters
of second grade to eat my lunch.

The third section moves fluidly through time, reconciling personal and collective grief, from the death of the poet’s brother to the memory of Anne Frank. In “A Final Offering,” these threads converge in an intimate act of love on the part of her partner, a funeral director.

He brought the Entenmann’s cookies
and Russian candies his grandmother loved,
to nestle in the crook of her arm
as she lay on his embalming table.

Food, love, and sustenance, continue as central motifs:

          Only in the thick quiet of night, could she, Masha, twist
and turn, the knot of fear tightening.  She’d heard
the rumors — neighbors were killing Jews in the villages.
Villages like her family’s.

Kitchen and garden remain vital spaces:

          Decades later, to her lone grandson, born
to her only daughter, whom she had named
for bounty awaiting a fall, after the garden of Eden,
she offered the richest food—

Wallace’s poems are crisp, carefully crafted, and emotionally direct. They draw attention to the preciousness of loved ones, the sanctity of home, and the fragility of the wider world while insisting on the enduring necessity of hope. The final poem, “Bending Toward Hope,” echoes Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement about the arc of the moral universe, and reminds us that love and humanity—and the act of protecting what we love—remain constant, especially in these uncertain times.

Title: Keeping Room
Author: Ann E. Wallace
Publisher: Nixes Mate Books
Year: 2026

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About the Reviewer

Lynne Shapiro (she/her) is a poet who loves to travel for arts residencies. She’s spent time in Orkney (Scotland), Sefrou (Morocco), Santa Lucia (Spain), and East Sussex (England) with other artists and writers learning about local nature and culture. She is the author of two poetry books, Gala (Solitude Hill Press), and To Set Right (Wordtech Communications). Her non-fiction chapbook, Ants Passiflora and Me, and small edition artists’ book, Drone Poem, both published by Letra Muerta, Inc., are in various university library collections, including Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. She is currently at work on a manuscript about two trips to Scotland’s Northern Isles, forty years apart, tentatively titled, Glisk.