Whitacre’s Good Housekeeping is a piercing gaze into the locus of human life, the home—or “this cave, this tree, // this realm where loved ones circle and unwind.” Whitacre takes on timeless themes and in a contemporary context, touching on consumerism, war, and the climate crisis, while also entering an intimate space where mundane domestic scenes connect to what makes us most human: love, memory, and grief.

The title poem asks what sort of housekeepers modern people are, noting that “Greed is the root of evil yet it keeps us alive”. Despite this awareness that unrestrained consumerism “can’t go on like this;” Whitacre (author of The Elk in the Glade) acknowledges that, in truth, “this is all we have.” “War&Peace@Target” also examines this self-aware paralysis of humanity in the face of the destruction of our planet, juxtaposing notes on a shopping spree with haiku-like italic verses that illustrate the consequences of our addiction to buying things (“songbirds fall to the earth”). Whitacre continually finds resonance in the metaphor of housekeeping, and each poem sews a new layer to the tapestry of variations on home as a place, mindset, identity, and fantasy.

Alongside Whitacre’s exploration of consumer culture are gentler poems that portray a domestic idealism, as in “Mother’s Chair,” “The Foldout Couch,” and the moving “Narcissi, We Drown in Our Own Eyes.” In the latter, a compendium of declarations of love, he writes “I love you like an old oven crusty with drippings / of the problems we braised, oozing with radiance.” Though blunt about the ways human life has been warped by technology and waste, Whitacre’s poems also highlight another force, besides greed, that has long given life meaning: the impulse to love and be loved. In Whitacre’s collection, all of it, the horrors and the joys, exist simultaneously.

Takeaway: Urgent, moving poems about home, consumerism, and love.

Comparable Titles: Frank Bidart, Mark Wunderlich.

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