In her thoughtful debut collection, Theresa Monteiro uses the scenery of domestic and daily life to call forth fear and loss: the magnitude of human experience seen through the details of the ordinary. Under This Roof turns these abstractions into tangible moments and quietly but insistently asks us to contend with them.
Just as insistently, this collection offers the possibility of restoration, of making peace with grief, and of forging connection in a disrupted world. With clarity and generosity, these poems praise the human communion that can be created through language, even when language falls short. They show us how “good enough” can sometimes simply be good. Facing a world that is increasingly distrustful of hope, she asks, when has your despair predicted anything true?
Under This Roof is a poetry of the domestic, if by “domestic” you mean everything visible and invisible under the roof of Heaven (which is the way Du Fu and Li Bai thought of it, so why shouldn’t you?). The dailiness of family life here mirrors back the momentums of a soul making itself. Most spiritual writing is dominated by the solitude at its heart-what astounds and moves me so much about Monteiro’s poetry is the way she takes that solitude, the awareness of suffering and joy in it, and turns it into a shared thing. Though these poems are sometimes bound deeply with loss, there is not a single sour or bitter note to be heard here. In poetry (like life!), thinking needs the breathing space of feeling. Monteiro’s work breathes deeply, steadily. It has its wits about it always.
–David Rivard
In Theresa Monteiro’s debut Under This Roof, one feels like Dante at the outset of his divine journey, as we stand midway along our life’s journey, questioning if the right path has been lost. Indeed, these poems come at us from the middle-of a life, of a family, of the choices we have made and are forever bound to as Monteiro tenderly interrogates “the ambiguity of not knowing/if we are headed toward winter or spring.” This is a poetry that sifts the sacred from the domestic, that finds grace in the minute yet electric moments of being a mother, wife, and artist. In poems pared down to bone and blood, to muscle and sinew, Under This Roof is an extended aria perfectly pitched to sing our grief and ecstasy and the embattled sublimity that is our existence.
–Matt Miller
Theresa Monteiro’s debut Under This Roof posits home as both a physical house and a mindset-these are poems of ordinary time that are unabashedly heaven-fixed. Full of wisdom, humility, grief, and hunger, each poem reads as a suburban hymn looking “with one eye open, one eye closed,” both inward and outward for the kind of truth that disrupts familiar life. “Were you scrubbing charred/ onions from a pot while/ everything shifted?” the speaker asks, intent on tuning to the miracle at hand. This book is an invitation to see beauty above and beneath familial responsibility-and in doing so, remembering, in the truest sense, the way home.
–Lily Greenberg
Theresa Monteiro writes a poetry of movement and open and philosophical consciousness. Full of formal beauty and naturalistic music for us to discover, her poems move through the things of the world the way the best poetry teaches us to see ourselves and the world, grounded in relational love.
–David Blair
Theresa Monteiro
lives in New Hampshire with her husband and children. Her poetry appears in various journals including The American Journal of Poetry, River Heron Review, Cutleaf, The Banyan Review, Lily Poetry Review, and Poetry South, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.