BRINGING BACK THE HOUSE, poetry by Meredith Trede
Broadstone Books
Publication Date: February 15, 2023
Paperback, 82 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-29-5
$22.50 retail, $16.50 from publisher
Newsflash
Bringing Back the House’s hometown newspaper, The Cape May County Herald, publishes a feature with the backstory of Meredith Trede’s new book.
Why readers like Bringing Back the House…
I recently read an editorial that said AI will never replace artists, as it doesn’t experience pain or memory. I could feel both the pain and loss and also the wonderful memories of both people and place that you loved so much.
Corrine Collins, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Sorry I haven’t reached out sooner to tell you how much I love the new book!! Oh my – I couldn’t put it down. One page just led to another and another!! The places that you had to go to be able to put those thoughts and emotions on paper – well, I am in awe. And gratitude.
Liz Stebbins, Gilbertville, New York
Meredith Trede came into my life in 1972. She came into my heart very shortly thereafter. And if you have the chance to read her new book of poems, she’ll quickly take her place in your heart too. Meredith dares to dislodge us and then draw us in even closer. Thank you, Meredith, for your courage and your passion in doing this work and sharing it with us.
Susan Scarola, Fort Myers, Florida
I received my copy of your book in the mail yesterday. It looks beautiful! I opened it intending to leaf through it and put it aside to read carefully later. I couldn’t put it down! Poetry isn’t usually my thing [but] there is something about this book that resonates with me, but I can’t put the feelings into words.
I was there with you and your memories. I wanted to meet Uncle Joe and Aunt Louise. I remember walking the boards and going to the beach. “Two Blocks From the Beach” and the word picture of Aunt Rae hanging her suit on the line made me laugh out loud. My father had a collection of swizzle sticks in the china cabinet. The poems brought back the shore of my childhood with the sounds, smells, sights and feelings of sun, sand and musty rental houses. Thank you for this almost surreal trip to the past.
Mary Jane Slugg, Cape May New Jersey
Why Broadstone Books selected this poetry collection...
If, as the architect Le Corbusier put it, a “house is a machine for living,” then it is a machine with a particularly intimate function, not only providing shelter for those who live within it, but over time becoming a repository of history and memory of those lives in their most private, vulnerable moments – the process by which it transforms into a home. It can also serve as a repository of the more physical time, accumulating the detritus of generations to be sifted through, fought over or discarded, a process often accompanied by grief or guilt. And, to push the metaphor just bit more, like any machine it suffers from abuse and neglect, declining into its own sort of death. All of this is the subject matter for Meredith Trede’s new poetry collection, Bringing Back the House, and as her title (and title poem) suggest, it is an act of reclamation and renovation, an effort to “Reweave the tapestry of vanished time.” Through these poems she invites us into her house and its memories, and we accompany her as she unearths family secrets and reconnects with long dead relatives through the things left behind, like an aunt’s blue velvet robe “Found along with secrets / of devotion, deceit, and sorrow” that she still wears thirty years later, though acknowledging “I know I will have to let it go.” That’s a sentiment that will be all too familiar to those readers who have had the experience of settling the affairs of departed family members (and for those who haven’t yet had the experience, this is a foretaste of what is to come). But if learning to let go is one of the lessons here, there is also the hope of turning the page, and writing the next chapter in the history of the house through the act of living: “Toss out decades; level, saw, sand. / Darling house, you’ll soon be grand.” And so will those who shelter within it.
The Publisher
Why other writers endorsed this book...
I just spent a beautiful weekend in Wildwood, New Jersey—at the shore exploring an old house full of memories and redolent with the scent of cigarettes and scotch; reading never-read letters from people long gone, and realizing those we love the most in childhood may perplex us the most as adults. This amazing Proust-like experience came to me via Meredith Trede’s new book, Bringing Back the House, which holds a family mystery as its backbone, and reaffirms Faulkner’s belief that “the past is never dead. It‘s not even past.”
Ann Cefola, author of When the Pilotless Plane Arrives, and translated selections from Hélène Sanguinetti’s The Hero / Hence This Cradle.
A summer retreat two blocks from “the boards ”⸺the beach boardwalk on the Jersey Shore is the center of Meredith Trede’s Bringing Back the House. Wrapped around this house is the artful story of family histories and the secrets held by those long gone, told in narrative and sometimes epistolary poems formed from material found in archival letters. “We were building a family tree” Trede writes in “My Aunt’s Blue Velvet Robe.” This collection is that tree: in particular there is Aunt Louise who marries the pastor second time around, and the beloved Uncle Joe who had two families it turns out, as well as other kindred, vivid in poems which “always know more than the heart allows” (“Pity Me Not the Waning of the Moon”). We can hear the multitude of voices rising in Trede’s skilled hand. This collection wows the reader in its consideration of all that is lost and all that is found.
Susana H. Case, author of Dead Shark on the N Train & The Damage Done
Meredith Trede’s new book Bringing Back the House is an intensely personal and profoundly universal meditation on the power and mystery of time. It’s a visceral paradox: the images that represent a world endure and gain in power even as that world vanishes. Maybe that’s why signs and symbols have such authority in our minds. Trede’s work is crucially grounded in time and place: Wildwood, the proximity and aftermath of an all-consuming war: but she’s at the core of every human life when she explores how we experience the jujitsu of memory⸺the more the past recedes, the more we feel its heft: “the nothing brushing the back // of your neck, ruffling your hair; an ashy / taste in your mouth; your dead father’s // step on the stair, his bald head above / a crowd; caress of your aunt blessed, // handsewn chiffon, first grownup dress—the past taunting you over and over.” Trede is our guide to a visionary dream world of finalities, “swizzle sticks, stirrers and shakers,” where it’s hard to tell the living from the revenants: “her she-who-was blooms a ghostly presence / in the antique armoire’s clouded mirror.” Bringing Back the House is unforgettable.
D. Nurkse, author of A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems
Meredith Trede’s Bringing Back the House is a book of home and longing for home, its inhabitants and furnishings. The poet understands what William Carlos Williams meant when he said, “No ideas but in things.” Every object in Trede’s poems holds memories, brings back long-ago mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles, yet she has a firm grip on the “now” she’s living “…rotting / pinafores, boleros, cardigans, ponchos, dried out minks, / dinner jackets, toppers, mantuas, muumuus, stiletto heels / reams of brittle letterhead, fountain pens….” Readers will find their own, memory-filled homes in this inviting collection.
Bertha Rogers, author of Heart Turned Back & Wild
Photo Gallery
Bringing Back the House
Family Album
Meredith Trede
Meredith Trede is an award winning author of three collections of poetry: Bringing Back the House (Broadstone Books), Tenement Threnody (Main Street Rag Press), and Field Theory (SFA University Press).
As a Toadlily Press founder and editor, her chapbook, Out of the Book, was in Desire Path. Her extensive journal publications include Barrow Street, The Feminist Wire, Friends Journal, Gargoyle, Gathering of Tribes, and The Paris Review.
Meredith has been a librarian, an educator (French, Spanish, ESL, and writing), a lecturer, and an Organization Development consultant. As a principal in her own practice, she worked within the U.S. and internationally.
Meredith took a mid-career break from her business to earn an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She studied with Tom Lux, Jean Valentine, Suzanne Gardinier, Marie Howe and Alfred Corn. She holds an MA in Management Development from The New School, and a BA, with Honors, in French from The State University of New York.
Meredith has held writing residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Ragdale, Saltonstall, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Virginia and France. She serves on the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee.
Meredith lives in New York City and is the curator of an old family home on the New Jersey shore.
Meredith Trede is an award winning author of three collections of poetry: Bringing Back the House (Broadstone Books), Tenement Threnody (Main Street Rag Press), and Field Theory (SFA University Press).
As a Toadlily Press founder and editor, her chapbook, Out of the Book, was in Desire Path. Her extensive journal publications include Barrow Street, The Feminist Wire, Friends Journal, Gargoyle, Gathering of Tribes, and The Paris Review.
Meredith has been a librarian, an educator (French, Spanish, ESL, and writing), a lecturer, and an Organization Development consultant. As a principal in her own practice, she worked within the U.S. and internationally.
Meredith took a mid-career break from her business to earn an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She studied with Tom Lux, Jean Valentine, Suzanne Gardinier, Marie Howe and Alfred Corn. She holds an MA in Management Development from The New School, and a BA, with Honors, in French from The State University of New York.
Meredith has held writing residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Ragdale, Saltonstall, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Virginia and France. She serves on the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee.
Meredith lives in New York City and is the curator of an old family home on the New Jersey shore.
Hear and Read Meredith's Poetry
New York City Pastoral
I’ve lived these middle years in a place with trees,
time enough for greenery to take root in my dreams,
but my reverie’s still lit by the bright white smiles
of billboard queens, by smoke rings puffed high above
Times Square, or the flamingo-pink skin of a spauldeen
ball as it arcs from the pebbly nub of concrete past
the iron rimmed curb to the trash gummed gutter.
Sure I know the easy flower of dogwood, leaf of maple,
but hemlock, fir, or pine are just evergreens, as every
bird’s call and color blurs despite my birdbook guide.
Perfect earth-bound bouquets flourish in neighbors’ yards;
all I have are strays dropped by wind or creature to bed
in dirt, warm dirt, piled deep for growth, not the grime
that blackens city window sills. I was taught that what
you put in dirt will not come up clean. The hold for me
is spring’s hard bounce of rain on ash can lids, summer
asphalt hot to the step, fall’s frantic dance of soot-filled
swirls, every snow a thin clean skin to cover stain.
originally published in The MacGuffin
From The All About Story Book
Copyright 1929, an old primer
for a little girl in the ’50s,
red lacquered cloth cover unraveling,
glossy pages part from the spine
but the watercolors still glow
and the stories: “All About
Dear Little Small Red Hen” wilier than
the fox, dead and lay still and stark, killed
by boiling oil. Angry tigers run so fast
round a tree they melt into a butter circle.
Peter Rabbit loses his clothes again. Of course
Grethel kills the witch while one wolf turns
into Little Red’s new winter coat and another’s
the main course for a Little Pig. And Mickey
the Long Tail Monkey, his heart’s desire
breaks his heart. Only Miss Fluffy Chick
and Little Boy Blue get to see the world
in a dream of happy ending.
Stay home. Watch your back. Be good. Yeah, right.
Fox Wolf Tiger Witch. Take a walk
on the wild side. Get a fluffy yellowdown
mini dress. Don’t read so much.
originally published in Western Humanities Review
The Fall in Connemara
We were one with the water.
Each lough a flat sheet of it
and the smell of green
in the night fields, night mist,
the slow fall of water
without boundary
from sky to stream.
Morning came silvered above,
below, and around the dream
you were leaving,
the dream to be found.
When the sun spilled over
the face of the water shone
in a sheer plane of joy.
originally published in Nebraska Review
Commentary
The latest, just in: a vital, oil/fruit-giving ally/adversary, reeling/recovering from
looting/swindlers, sympathy for this
side or that, we gave/withheld aid, sent
them planes/packing, their benevolent/
despotic leader says he’ll never leave/left,
our right/left leaders are bowled over/not
surprised, we will do everything we can,
which is probably what we did, lessons
in pronouncing capital cities interrupted
for celebrity wedding/beating/beheading,
until the faltering/unmitigated terror in
a righteous/reprehensible, resource-graced
land re-emerges oversold/a time bomb.
winner of the James J. Nicholson Political Poetry Contest
Public Events
Readings, Lectures, Book Fairs
Coming Soon
July 14, 2024. A Persistence of Cormorants Poetry Reading: Poets of Broadstone Books. In-person event. 1:30 pm, Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club.
Previous Events
April 19, 2024 Adverse Abstraction Event: Meredith joined Michael Laurence and Prince A. Mc Nally for a presentation of the written and spoken word. Otto’s Shrunken Head, NYC.
March 14th, 2024 Meredith joined Karen Karpowich, Susana Case, and Peter Nickowitz for a poetry reading in the round at the English Speaking Union.
October 28, 2023 Contributors Zoom reading from Wild Crone Wisdom.
July 30, 2023 A Persistence of Cormorants Poetry Reading.
July 29, 2023 12th Annual NYC Poetry Festival.
May 21, 2023 West-East Poetry Reading Series with L.J. Sysko, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Lena Hetchman Ayers. Video Available
May 4, 2023 Broadstone Books poets (in-person event.) 6 – 8 PM. Jefferson Market Library 425 Sixth Ave., New York, NY. Meredith joined Broadstone poets Indran Amirthanayagam, Myra Malkin, Mary Tautin Moloney, Claudia Serea, and Mervyn Taylor.
April 23, 2023 Poets Network & Exchange Awards for Lifetime Literary Achievement and Poetry Reading. Meredith read with other honorees. 3 p.m.
April 22, 2023 Bringing Back the House Poetry Reading and Book signing, Warner Library, Tarrytown, NY. Meredith was joined by Susana H. Case, Lily Greenberg, Pamela Hart, Ann Lauinger, and Lisa Shirley, each reading a personal poem about a house. 2:00 PM.
April 2, 2023 Broadstone Books 20th Anniversary Celebration, Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY. New collections by nine local Broadstone authors.
March 25, 2023 Broadstone Reading Stage presented Brenda Nicholas, Claudia Serea, & Meredith Trede
Publications
Publications
Poetry Collections
Chapbooks
Out of the Book in a four-author, perfect-bound collection titled Desire Path, 2005
Cookbooks
Cooking with the Muse, Tupelo Press, by Myra Kornfeld and Stephen Massimilla included the poem, The Hunger, 2015.
Representative Journals and Anthologies
- Aji: The Gestalt of It All.
- AMP: The Arch of Hysteria.
- Barrow Street: Through Summer’s Time.
- Baybury Review: The Siren’s Call.
- BigCityLit: Across the Street at the Old Dutch Burying Ground; Dance Through the Days; Little Lady Bountiful and the Poor Widow Lady.
- Blue Mesa Review: A Covenant; The Hunger.
- Blueline: As She Taught Me; At the Ophthalmologist’s Office; Drawing the Field at the Arts Colony; The Will of the Bees.
- Borderlands: Far from a Roman Spring.
- Bridges Anthology: Dance Through the Days.
- Caesura: Sweet.
- Codhill Press Anthology: Between Now and Never.
- Colere: They’ve Closed the Five and Dime.
- Common Ground Review: Echo of the Undertow.
- Comstock Review: China Rising; Turning This Way and That.
- Concho River Review: Driving away from the Sun.
- Conversations Across Borders: A Note to the Dead.
- The Cortland Review: Stumbling Home the Night after Pearl Harbor.
- The Courtship of Winds: TV News; D-Day at the American Cemetery; What a National Guardsman Does during a Pandemic.
- Cowboys & Cocktails, True Grit Saloon Anthology: Courting Stella.
- Crone Lit/Wild Librarian: The Birthday Fairy; Last Laughs with the Banger Sisters.
- Dash Literary Journal: As It Is Woven.
- Datebook Women Artists 2020: Pity Me Not the Waning of the Moon.
- Datebook Women Artists 2023: Nightflight.
- Diner: Bad Cess to Her.
- Earth’s Daughters: Nana Comes to America; Using Her Grandmother’s Flour Sifter.
- Elysian Fields: Joltin’ Joe, the Fine Arts and Me.
- Erratica: Paper Dolls.
- Evening Street Review: Bring Him Home; Pacing the Shore; Passing On.
- Fan: Baseball Haiku.
- Feile-Festa: Doing Her Proud.
- The Feminist Wire: Joan’s Voices; Surviving Birds; To Have and Have Not.
- Floating Bridge Review: Another Night on the Road.
- Friends Journal: I Tell Him about the Body Bags.
- Gargoyle: An American in a French Cemetery; Cassandra; Child of My Child; Creation; Returns of the Day New Mexico; Steel the Soldiers’ Hearts; Still the Noises; What Will You Wear to War; Xian Warrior.
- Gathering of Tribes: Gifted Girls.
- Gihon River Review: Looking into the Drought; On a Class Trip with Ranger Ron.
- Healing Muse: Jet Lag.
- Heliotrope: Mysteries; Owing to One Part of Speech; A Summer Day on a Country Porch.
- The Homestead Review: In Our Front Yard.
- I 70 Review: Moving Through the Tropical Air.
- I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe: One Day in the 60s.
- The Irish American Post: Back to the Neighborhood; Irish in the British Museum; The Prettiest Girl in the Parish; Pulling Up Stakes; Senses Out of Time; State of Grace.
- Journey to Crone: Respite in Cancale.
- The Kerf: The City and the Sea; Topographies; Widow’s Watch.
- The Ledge: At Ground Zero; Senile Dementia, My Dad, and Me.
- Liberty Hill Poetry Review: Runaway.
- Lumina: The Ghazal in the Mirror; The Kiss Parenthetically.
- Main Street Rag: Uncle George’s Fish.
- The McGuffin: New York City Pastoral.
- The Midday Moon: Hauntings.
- MER: In the Eye of the Virgin; Jarheads; Taking Back the Daughter of the Night; Vestigial Organs; Riding Away.
- Naugatuck River Review: Bringing Back the House; A Cameo; Working against the Case.
- The Nebraska Review: As Light Transcends Time; The Fall in Connemara; Holiday in Germany.
- Neovictorian/Cochlea: Dear Mary.
- The New Laurel Review: Madonna and Child.
- New Mexico Poetry Review: Icon.
- Oracle: In the Artist’s Studio Works in Progress; In Knowledge What.
- Panamowa: Observing Protocol; Pictures of Aunt Louise.
- The Paris Review: During the Reading Wherein the Poem of Billy C Disrobes Emily D; Ladies Who Lunch; On Seeing an Ex-Husband on the Cheese Line of the Gourmet Grocery Store; Through My Most Grievous Fault.
- Persimmon Tree: The Town That Never Was.
- Phoebe: Role Playing at the Management Seminar.
- PMS poemmemoirstory: Working Around Peterson’s Field Guide.
- Poemeleon: Going Through Changes; The Widows Lunch.
- Poetry Bone: Les Causeuses.
- Poetry Motel: Call It Out.
- Poetry South: In His Line of Sight; The Willowware Sings.
- Qarrtsiluni: We Never Talk Anymore.
- RE:AL, The Journal of the Liberal Arts: A Photo Shoot on Astor Place.
- The Recorder: Back to the Streets; From the Underground; The Mugging.
- Room of One’s Own: Familial Signs; After the Biopsy.
- RUNES: Once Numinous Landscape.
- The Same: Beware the Conjurie.
- San Pedro River Review: Pietà; No Way Out; Through a Dark Wood; Lot’s Wife Sees Ahead.
- Scintilla: My Marine My Grandson; New Ways to War.
- A Slant of Light: Between Now and Never.
- So to Speak: Behind the Looking Glass.
- The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review: Some Questions at the Nursing Home.
- Texas Poetry Calendar: Stella.
- 13th Moon: Lessons from Uncle Ned.
- Tipton Poetry Journal: Tomorrow Before.
- Tucumcari Literary Review: Keeping Company; Lady-in-Waiting.
- Two Hundred New Mexico Poems: Out of the Frame.
- Urban Spaghetti: As You Taught Me.
- Valley Voices: Coloring the End Of July; From Here to There; The First Ones; Return Flight; Rise Up at the Voice of the Bird.
- West Branch: A New Law Tenement—1941; October Offerings; Pre-Cana; Standing; Sundown Syndrome.
- Westchester Review: My Father’s Harmonica; She Speaks to the Stones.
- Western Humanities Review: From The All About Storybook.
- Wings: Leavings.
- Witness: Looking for Degrees of Consanguinity.
- World Enough Writers Coffee Poems Anthology: Lo, Yon Cup Runneth.
- Written Tales: Season’s End.
- The Xavier Review: Out of the Book—Author’s Note, Parts I, II, III, VII, VIII, IX.
- Yellow Bat Review: The Heart of Rock ‘n Roll.
Forthcoming: San Pedro River Review: Fear of Flowers; Stone Canoe: Science, Please Explain How; Valley Voices: Tattooed Catholic.