I read this through UST Publishing House’s compilation with Hush Harbor. My idea of this second poetry collection prior to reading it was Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta lamented on the death of a (her?) father, and the title represents the destruction of the house upon the absence of the head. After sitting through the collection, I was surprised to have read fewer elegies about the father than poems about love and sex. Maybe that’s why “house” is written in plural in the title. On one hand, we have a house burning because of raging grief; on the other we have a house burning because of inextinguishable desire. Regardless of what the title exactly alludes to, the constant theme of this collection is absence: the absence of a father figure as well as the absence of a partner. What do we do with these empty spaces? Perhaps write a poem, perhaps write at least one whose lines are connected and never-been-done-before for once.