Poetry Of/At Scale

Review of Medrie Purdham’s Little Housewolf (2021)

By Izzi Holmes

“And that was our domestic cliffhanger,” begins “Hinge,” the first poem in Medrie Purdham’s Little Housewolf. Though “Hinge” opens mid-sentence, on a cliffhanger of its own, and Purdham never reveals what comes before the inaugural conjunction, the words “And” and “that” gesture outward to something that “was.” Before “Hinge” has a clear subject, it presents a history and a community: speaker and reader already constitute an “our.” They share “domestic” intimacy as soon as the first line break, the first poetic hinge that sets the work into motion.

Published by Véhicule Press in 2021, Purdham’s debut collection leans into its collectedness, embracing found and everyday objects as unlikely subjects. What results is an attentive poetics of proportion, orientation, and order—referential and reverential meditations on ordinary things made extraordinary—that reverberates beyond the lyric lines of Little Housewolf.

Throughout Little Housewolf, children are as vocal as—if not more agential than—adults. “Quiz me again,” asks one young, inquisitive speaker in “Clear Patrick,” a rollicking, ballad-like poem about a child’s imaginary friend and the speaker’s experience portraying their imaginary parent. While necessarily imagined, whether Clear Patrick himself is real is never called into question, and every stanza begins and ends with the same affirming refrain: “Clear Patrick is.” “Clear Patrick” serves as a reminder that certain realities—while not always tangible, legible, or visible to everyone—are nonetheless sincere and valid for those who perceive them. In “Buzz,” the fourth part of a section written from perspective of various insects, an existential question emerges from another small human voice: “Is stone a hero?” Purdham need not save the methodical, methodological, and at times, scientific attentional mode typical of her work for a grand poetic subject. Instead, in Little Housewolf, every voice, creature, and muse emerges with the dignity of a philosopher, as a site of legitimate inquiry, regardless of their size.

Though Little Housewolf is primarily composed of poems on familiar creatures and images in traditional modes and forms, Purdham’s perspective remains fresh by virtue of her off-kilter vantage point. Purdham draws on unexpected metaphorical referents to sharpen depictions of tangible creatures. In “Dog Days with Borrowed Dog,” for example, a voice asks, “How can / a four-footed creature walk in dactyls?” Likewise, in “Carapace,” Purdham’s speaker describes the “spread” of crabs as they “settle their collectivity on the sand” by comparing this process to that of “a wound still charting its own outline.” While poetic in language, such referents are also poetic in purpose, as Purdham swaps vehicle and tenor, turning metaphors inside out. These crabs only come into focus by way of a writer figure, in this case a wound penning and affirming its own selfhood, while the dogs emerge in time with an uneven, dactylic meter, on their toes (their own dactyls!). By writing about the miniature aspects of everyday life with such gravitas, Purdham begins to re-scale and re-order the outside world.

In “Deciduous Song,” an ekphrastic and introspective ecopoem that appears near the end of the collection, Purdham’s poetic re-scaling emerges with additional clarity. Though the poem draws on Jeff Mifflin’s “Piano Tree” exhibit, where Mifflin merges the two titular objects, Purdham imagines the moments before their fusion. Her poem opens as a tree “plunges / wood fingers into and through” an abandoned piano, as if human, to both violate and produce music. Yet right when nature’s triumph over man-made art seems inevitable, a new view of the relation between objects emerges from Purdham’s revisionary poem it might be “the piano that's acting on the tree,” not the other way around. Only by taking on this perspective does the speaker realize how apt the dissolution of hierarchical boundaries between forest and instrument is to their own life—the violent excision of the piano-ed tree (or tree-ed piano) parallels giving birth. Mother and child, like the dialectic of tree and piano, rewrite the borders between self and world.

Purdham’s proposal for a re–scaled world without an internal/external divide comes to fruition in “Rowan, We are Ordinary.” Purdham borrows the phrase “now there are no bonds except the flesh” from Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Manzini: Escape Artist,” placing it in parentheses to preserve the integrity of MacEwen’s phrase. Although Purdham makes no syntactic revision to the original text, MacEwen repeats her line to affirm that the artist is confined to his corporeal body until death, while Purdham’s invocation calls on an opposite experience of birth: the irreversible separation from a mother’s body. The speaker's claim that “now there are no bonds” but those of “flesh,” no physical tie between parent and child after birth, is neither obstacle nor cause for bleak surrender, but rather a recognition: now the two have the opportunity to forge new bonds beyond the limits of the body. Rather than wait for objects to assert their meaning, Purdham suggests, we must cultivate wonder from existing matter, chronicle life from above, upside-down, and inside-out. After all, for Purdham, poetry emerges as equal parts nature and nurture, text and context, art and frame.

Purdham effectively summarizes her conscientious and prescient debut collection best in the poem “Tilt-Shift,” which perhaps also constitutes a fitting alternate title for the entire work. Opening with the image of “A subplot to a subplot to a subplot,” a line that encapsulates Purdham’s interest in the underbelly of everyday life, “Tilt-Shift” goes on to depict an elusive, destabilizing “miniaturizing lens,” through which the known world appears in small, emerging with both greater resolution and a concrete poetic valence. Herein lies the clarifying power of Little Housewolf — a collection that not only makes visible the poetic forces that punctuate our world but helps us imagine what they could be if we tilt our heads ever so slightly to the side.

Works Cited

Purdham, Medrie. Little Housewolf. Véhicule Press, 2021.

Born and raised in New York City, Izzi Holmes is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in English literature at McGill University, where she also co-edits Scrivener Creative Review.

20 Janurary 2026