“Howard Altmann interrogates the sky, the light, the world, about their intentions. If he seldom finds reassuring answers, he finds something better: ‘When all that consoled consoles no longer / loneliness finds a room inside the one it knows.’ These poems are as essential as a glass of water.” – John Ashbery

“Though not exactly a nature poet, Howard Altmann is a poet of his own mysterious kingdom, ‘a house’ in which he has built a house, whose walls are open to the inspiration of air. (‘Frightened of the next life / being exactly like this life / he asked to be a bird’ or ‘Let it not be words / you reach for you say – / where the trees stand / far from men’). To have discovered this kingdom and inhabited it (like Keats’ Imagination, as monk to monastery) – to have found words for what isnearlyunsayable – is a measure of this poet’s uncanny transformational gift. Enter the house of these poems and stay on, a grateful tenant in this remarkable state of wonder.” – Carol Muske-Dukes

“Howard Altmann has found a way to make language transform itself. If the elusive moment between I and Thou could speak, it might be one of his quietly amazing lines – ‘you ask the silence to invert itself / like a gymnast in the dark . . . ‘ Without a trace of rhetoric,In This House reminds us of the power of poetry: to show us how to live in a world in which we are strangers. It’s a thrill to come close to such an original and deeply realized art.” – Dennis Nurkse