Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

Poets and Poems: Katharine Whitcomb and “Habitats”

By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Red Flower Whitcomb

Katharine Whitcomb frames a life with forests, hotels, and dreams

Welcome to Habitats, Katharine Whitcomb’s newest collection of poetry. You are entering a collection much as you would enter a large house — say, an old three-story house that seems new until you walk through the rooms. Each room is a piece of your life.

You walk through the first floor, and the rooms are less a progression and more a representation of how memory works. Thinking of a thrush reminds you of winter weather, or that Saturday when you fell asleep in front of the gas fireplace, “like an old dog.” You feel safe and secure, just like you did when you were a girl and dreamed of yourself inside of your books. Each room is a tree in the forest of memory, including the memory of people who have died.

The rooms of the second floor are hotels where you’ve stayed or dreamed about staying — Vienna, Paris, Italy, Istanbul, Budapest, Macao, Slovenia, perhaps even a generic place that is every hotel. Each has its story, and your story while you stay there.

The third floor is the floor where each room is a dream. No room is like another, and the progression, if you can call it that, is jumbled and without particular rhyme or reason, except for one constant — the dreamer. A dream about an inscription on a cliff face gives way to one about Anna Karenina or the National Zoo, followed by apple-picking or the world coming to an end. You know these poems have meanings, or perhaps only one meaning, and wander through each room trying to understand.

This poem is one of the rooms on the first floor, a room that is choked with an unsolved mystery, and you’re not sure which is more important — that it’s a mystery or that it’s unsolved.

Murder Mystery

Habitats WhitcombSo, the car rests side-saddle on the trail while she walks the dog
& she didn’t tell anybody where she was going. No, no dog,

only her iPod but no purse or backpack, not even a PowerBar
in the pocket of her running pants. Or maybe the holidays

came & instead of flying east as usual she didn’t but we just assumed.
The creek bubbles thickly over the rocks down the slope,

barely liquid. Footprints ink the snow but they’re blown out.
No car, no dog, & the porch lights blaze all night & all day

in an un-notable way. No more piles of envelopes carried to
the post office, no sloppy shoveling jobs, no more shades up
then down, no gray garbage bin on the curb Sunday nights.
She kept a quiet house in the first place. Messages to the larger world

do not return the favor, she should have known. & fate has a tall swing
like the one out back, where once her feet hit the blue curtain of the sky.

Katharine Whitcomb

Katharine Whitcomb

Whitcomb has published two previous collections, The Daughter’s Almanac and Saints of South Dakota & Other Poems, and two poetry chapbooks, Hosannas and Lamp of Letters. She is also the co-author of The Art Courage Program, a parody self-help book. Whitcomb has received a number of prizes and awards, including being a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Her poems have been published in a number of anthologies and literary magazines, including Narrative, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and The Missouri Review. The Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Central Washington University, she lives in Vermont.

Habitats is a collection of rooms, the rooms we inhabit in our lives. Some are physical, some are foreign; some are pleasant while others are not, and still others are both at the same time. But it’s these rooms that we examine to make sense of our lives, as Whitcomb does so vividly and arrestingly.

Photo by A.Peach, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

How to Read a Poem by Tania Runyan

5 star

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Glynn Young
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of the Civil War romance Brookhaven, as well as Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)
  • A History of Children’s Stories: “The Haunted Wood” by Sam Leith - May 20, 2025
  • World War II Had Its Poets, Too - May 15, 2025
  • Czeslaw Milosz, 1946-1953: “Poet in the New World” - May 13, 2025

Filed Under: book reviews, Books, Poems, poetry, poetry reviews, Poets

Try Every Day Poems...

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our May Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Glynn on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Sandra Fox Murphy on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”
  • Bethany R. on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy