In Standard American English, writer and multidisciplinary artist Elisabeth Houston brings her readers deep into the world of baby, a persona she has been developing in performance contexts for nearly a decade. The poems in this debut collection emerge from the abject dialectic of baby’s psyche—where a self in formation staggers under the weight of sexual abuse, body image dysmorphia, rapacious materialism, fame obsession, and racial fetishism. What is witnessed here is the way late capitalism unfolds brutal games of power, affecting all dimensions of life, with the potential to consume and ravage individual actors, as well as entire communities and cultures.

 

Praise for Standard American English

This heartbreaking, experimental cycle of surrealist poems by Elisabeth Houston is a helluva ride in the Kathy Acker tradition of Blood and Guts in High School. As a meta-commentary and indictment of self-congratulatory New York cultural denizens, academia, art circles and romanticized self-harm, Standard American English considers how language and its resonances can hurt, box us in, destroy us even as it purports to make and save us. There are two primary characters in S.A.E.: Baby and the dissociating narrator that observes Baby’s life, never once intervening to help, to save. Using the particularities of various New York representations, we see how people fall through the cracks, pick themselves up, harm and judge themselves, harm and judge others. Who is Baby? She’s everyone we callously don’t care about, everyone we’re too cute to embrace. This rollicking hybrid tour-de-force from Elisabeth Houston evokes introspections on society from Acker, Wanda Coleman, Alfred Hitchcock, Jennifer Jazz, Akilah Oliver and Natalie Wynn. Houston indicts every individual’s displaced capacity for cruelty under the patina of hipness. And yet, we root for Baby, we hope for Baby, and in doing so, in the end, maybe there’s hope for us.

— Tracie Morris, author of Who Do with Words

 

There are writers who write and use language that already exists and lead us into new ways of seeing. There are also writers who invent language and form, who carve out words and names and experiences from earth’s substance and bring a new universe into existence. Elisabeth Houston is an interdisciplinary artist, a poet, and is such an inventor, a new voice to ready ourselves for, a voice we need. What I admire in this debut book of poetry is not only the satire, social commentary, the swagger, the baby persona, the language fused from pop culture, but also the danger this writer flirts with, through subject matter, race and feminism, bulimia and sexual abuse and more… that in this book’s great moments exposes and makes truth stare at you unabashed and it is moving.

— Pamela Sneed, author of Funeral Diva