The Rented Altar

• The Rented Altar
• Price: $16.00
• 978-1-949540-14-7
• September 2020
• Poetry - PB
• Pages - 82

MEET THE AUTHOR

We asked Lauren Berry two questions. Why did you write The Rented Altar, and why do you write poetry?

“I wrote The Rented Altar to challenge the wicked stepmother archetype. Reimagining stepmotherhood, I gave my speaker the humanizing gifts of wonder and humility.”
&
“I write surreal, domestic poetry. I’m fascinated by the emotional charge of a home and how, inside our own walls, we are strikingly vulnerable.”

C&R Press 2019 Poetry Book Award
IPPY Gold Award in Poetry
Eric Hoffer Award Honorable Mention
Writers Tell All Review

Lauren Berry’s stunning second collection follows a young bride through the maze of a Floridian suburb. As her husband’s second wife, she enters stepmotherhood unprepared for its storybook tradition of distrust, a pain intensified by her discovery that she is unable to conceive a child of her own. Each failed attempt to create life is a stone thrown into a pond, rippling her every surface. She loses her stepson in neighborhood gardens, obsesses over a bar of soap left by the previous wife, and plants lingerie in her bathroom as handymen remodel her vanity. The Rented Altar presents a haunting series of surrealist narratives, and the poems sing darkly of one woman’s inability to steady herself in her new domestic kingdom.

Praise

“If I could choose anyone to rewrite the Bible, it would be Lauren Berry. By that I mean, she knows how to talk about beauty without leaving out the blood. In The Rented Altar, Berry is at her best and most unforgiving, revealing the gritty underbelly of fertility, marriage, and a womanhood fraught with imagination, loneliness, eroticism, and loss. Berry trusts her reader to feel the emotional weight of a tangible object with just its image—a dirty dish, an empty crib, chunks of pineapple punctured by a skewer. Because of this, The Rented Altar reads both like a set of clues and the reveal, everything you want to know about what it means to become another version of yourself but can’t bring yourself to say out loud.”
—Olivia Gatwood, author of Life of the Party (Dial Press, 2019)

“These daring poems push at the dark edges of love, into realms often left unspoken. An existential dilemma lurks at the heart of this collection: what does it mean to love someone who has had a life outside of that love? The solution to this dilemma is—perhaps—the power an uttered word can manifest. Where is that dirt now? the poet asks, near the end of this unsettling and beautiful collection. And is it in fact like love / in that it can never disappear?”
—Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You (Graywolf, 2019)