how to home
by E.W. Sparks
E.W. Sparks
E. W. Sparks is a graduate of the UCSD writer’s graduate program, a graduate of the USC Rossier School of Education, and a public school teacher practicing inclusive and activist methodologies of teaching. They are a father of five, a published poet and musician, and a survivor of homelessness spanning the cityscapes of Los Angeles, CA, Cleveland, OH, and Phoenix, AZ. Their writing focuses on the human diasporic moment of separation from safety in personal and collective apocalypses, on the injection of love as decolonizing affect into education, and on the personal growth that surviving traumas inspires. Ethan’s work has been featured in The Allegheny Review, UCSD’s New Writer’s Series, Now That’s What I Call Poetry reading series, and Amor Forense: birds in shorts city, una antologia de cuerpos escribiendo en san diego.
praise for how to home
The exposures of the house bones and memory’s muscle, the exposures to lead and filament and the encyclopedia of craft holding up the smooth blank pages of drywall, Sparks’ poetry is the hum of living work within the walls of a house and the work of making a home outside them. Sparks opens these walls with patient instruction, guiding our hands to share this work of home, and giving us over to the slow tensions that soak into the frame and keep it upright over our head. These poems have the spread wisdom of a writer with his hands on the structure, and the steady, unyielding love of a craftsman who knows why he works, and for whom.
– Grant Leuning, Co-founder & Curator of NOW Poetry series, author of Piss Cameron and I Don't Want to Die in the Ocean
Within these pages, the quotidian framing of a house becomes a canvas for the illusory passages drawn by fading memories of a spectral family history. In this chapbook, the act of painting a wall transforms into a meditation on life, memory, and change. Through hyperrealistic imagery, precise sets of instructions, and exact units of measurement, Sparks invites readers to feel the weight of a roller, smell the primer, feel the coarseness of drywall, live the idleness of parks, and experience the transformation of a surface from old to new. With each stroke, a story unfolds – a narrative of doubt, of homing, and of the ghosts that linger in forgotten rooms, in between breathing patterns, and behind dusty moldings. This is Sparks’ invitation to join the poet on a journey of discovery, where the crafts of construction and renovation become metaphors for the complexities of existence.
– Marco Antonio Huerta Alardín , Co-Author with Sara Uribe of Magnitud/e, Author of Hay un jardín
