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You can approach Gianna Russo’s One House Down as a book about place, and yes, you’ll certainly leave with a history and the flavor of how Tampa used to be—the dark and the light. Or you can approach it as a book about family and you’ll leave with a feel for the bonds dis/connecting the author’s family. Or (best choice) you can read One House Down for the series of images it offers, one after another after another—each one so fresh and exact it’s difficult to resist stealing a few for your own work. That is not a joke.I read many poetry volumes each year and consider a book a success (for me) if I find a handful of poems that truly jump off the page (handful: noun, two or three, four tops). But One House just doesn’t let up. Poem after poem, line after line refuse to just sit there, placidly, on the page.And yes, I have examples.A horse, Blondie, surrendering to the heat of the sun and the weight of a carriage:“Charleston is a hot shave/when Blondie collapses in the street … /a thousand sacks of wet flour …/horseshoes plodding the wrong way, /the luck running out”The bonding/dividing of a grandfather with/from his granddaughter as he drives her to see the ’67 Tampa race riots:“But even a child knows fair from fair. /Other times he might have brought a gun: / his Old South stunned by uppity and righteousness. /My grandfather pulls me close, tells me, steer, /rolls down the window and stares.”And this:“When the blue jays suddenly caucus /in the aisles of a summer afternoon /screaming of a cabal”And this:“On long drives out to your house stars made a cliché of sky. /There was a gateway from grief and you walked through it. /Magnolia perfume is the gist it.”And, devastatingly, this:“Standing in line she looked like someone /had used her to stub something out.”And this and this and this. I love this book, all of it.