Lucky Stones

In Lucky Stones, Maisie Houghton fuses poetry and prose with humor, intimacy, moments of loss and enduring love. Her astute eye for details—hedge-hogs, making a margarita, a grand -mother in “folds of beige cashmere, smelling faintly of sweet peas and baby powder”—offer windows into a richly observant life and a distinctive way of seeing the world. Each poem is paired with a short, illuminating reflection that adds context to the verse that follows.

The poetry itself is gently honed, conversational but elegant, melodic and punctuated with surprise. Maisie has masterfully updated her coming of age memoir Pitch Uncertain, covering more territory in a wonderfully complementary medium. An island in Maine, a farm outside Corning, a Swiss village and a childhood home in Cambridge are some of the settings. But throughout, Lucky Stones is about four generations of family life—the mundane, the celebratory, the mournful and the opaque—rendered beautifully by a gifted writer with an exacting memory who has developed a distinctive voice with a very “certain pitch.”

In the air-born lines of her poetry and her prose, Maisie Houghton captures, without describing it, a whole way of living. Her voice is so intimate and direct that the reader can enter her experience and see the scenes she writes about. She never strains to be poetic. She simply opens to us the truth of a woman’s life.

—HAYDEN HERRERA, author of Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo and Upper Bohemia: A Memoir

Lucky Stones celebrates relationships—all kinds—loved, complicated, familial. These poems capture how love is hard, and sweetly, at times, soft. Houghton has an anecdote mirroring each poem giving the reader even more insight into the poet’s world.

—ALEXIS IVY, author of Taking the Homeless Census

Maisie Houghton chooses a unique structure for the poems in Lucky Stones: prose entries followed on the facing page by a poem. The prose provides context for the poems, which open up to larger concerns, and that in turn makes the reader understand the prose in new ways. The dynamic between the two provides an exhilarating creative tension. We are lucky indeed for Lucky Stones!

—WENDY MNOOKIN, author of Dinner with Emerson