The Night House, by Sabrina Dalla Valle

Prose, chapbook, 48 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

This is not a fatal cancer story about grief and loss; it is a death mass for those who never fully depart—just transcend. Part cinema verité, part ancient wisdom written in direct, sparse language with fragments of old diaries and letters, this mixed-genre lyrical journal documents an uncanny relationship between illness and the symbolic world. It follows two years of observations about a woman inhabiting psychic places where the dying go to transform a body and a history into a pure idea.

"Raw and refined; confronting and captivating; the rhythm of this work weaves a magic that in the end is as spell-binding as its oncological onset is stark. Somewhere, between the ebb and flow of this great breathing, a 'still center' emerges; a secret sun which radiates invisible life even as the universe dissolves around it. For The Night House is both a hospice and a maternity ward for the death and rebirth of suns, where, in the midst of corporeal and cosmic collapse, a redeeming mystery remains: 'My mother finds new centers'."

—Aaron Cheak

"In a series of dated logs that feel like incantations, Dalla Valle records the daily labors and tender awe of caring for a mother who is part mystic, a seer already in a slightly different plane of reality.  Short excerpts of her mother’s diaries and father’s letters are woven into Dalla Valle's brilliant philosophical meditations on bewildering symptoms and regimens. Invasive scopes and scanners produce 'electron eyes spinning round and round' her mother’s body. Instead of imaging this beloved figure, Dalla Valle 'mages', binding together these 'different eyes' into intimate, loving focus. In this prismatic origin story, Dalla Valle asks the big question: Do we ever really know anyone?"

—Vidhu Aggarwal

"The Night House  is a translucent witnessing beyond cancer cliché and the emotional trenches that come up when we struggle to write of mothers. Reading it, I was cut to the bone, but also held gently over... a horizon of transformation that I didn’t know I needed until I was allowed to glimpse it."

—Amber DiPietra

Sabrina Dalla Valle, MFA makes things with language between the seen and unseen worlds. Author of 7 Days and Nights in the Desert (Tracing the Origin) selected for Best First Book Award (Kelsey Street Press, 2013) and two other chapbooks. Her work has been anthologized and archived in numerous places, notably PennSound; SFSU’s The Poetry Center Archives; BAMFA; J Paul Getty Research Institute Library; and St Petersburg Museum of History. She lives in St Petersburg, Florida. 

Find her on IG @sabrinadv18 or www.sabrinadallavalle.com to know more about her work.