Rules of the House

Apparently the first book of poems in English by (or about) a Tibetan-American, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's Rules of the House is set in Tibet and in the South Asian exile communities where Dhompa spent her youth. Her interconnected, memory-drenched poems (many in short prose paragraphs) move easily between particular Tibetan losses and a gnomic lyric mode that welcomes all comers: monastery kitchens sit beside funerals and love affairs, epigrams promise "wording eyes," and one page concludes "Give eyes to your feet. Don't follow.