Philadelphia, 1985: shuttered factories, stubborn neighborhoods, where racial tensions, economic decline, and fierce local pride coexisted with block-by-block resilience and the daily insistence on survival.
Philadelphia, 2020: hushed, anxious city-streets half-empty under lockdown, grief and fear moving through house walls even as neighbors found quiet, improvised ways to care for one another amid uncertainty.
The Baldwins lived here in 1985 and the McClarens took up residence in 2020. Their experiences were separate yet similar as they inhabited the same Philadelphia home, worlds apart. These Walls is a verse novella in which the house serves as a quiet witness telling the story of these two families. As the poems move between timelines, striking parallels emerge in how families respond to crises, care for one another, and absorb public history into their private lives. Intimate and spare, These Walls explores how place holds memory, revealing how different generations endure remarkably similar struggles-and how history lingers within the walls we call home.
Early Praise for These Walls:
Shannon Vare Christine’s These Walls is unlike any novella that I have read before. As a poet she masterfully uses the incorporation of sound to evoke feeling, and carry the images of the McClarens’ and the Baldwins’ daily lives. This short work of fiction pulls in pop culture and affairs of the times to build lives that feel real. Not only does this story explore the homes that make us, structurally and metaphorically, but it takes a detailed look at what happens within those walls, and how families years apart can be so tied together. To have the perspective of the house itself changes the reading experience entirely.
— Kayla Torres, Publicist & Poet
These Walls is a haunting and lyrical chronicle, weaving together the voices of a house and its many occupants across decades. Shannon Vare Christine layers history, grief, and hope into a seamless tapestry of verse, moving fluidly between unearthed memory, social commentary, and experimental form—creating a narrative in which the house becomes both witness and participant. With each stanza, Christine's words invite us to listen to the quiet murmurs of the spaces we call home.
— Katel LeDû founder and publisher at Make Known
In These Walls, time folds in on itself as decades quietly echo through rooms once filled with lives. Moving between past and present, the poems listen closely to day-to-day rituals, unfinished conversations, and the subtle ways history seeps into everyday space. With a narrative flow and an intimate, observant voice, the book builds through moments and reads like a hybrid of a verse novel and witness poetry, carrying a documentary-like, cinematic feel. Nostalgia, discovery, and unease coexist here, inviting readers to step inside and linger. These Walls is a quietly compelling work that reveals how memory settles, shifts, and waits to be noticed.
— Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, author of Trespassing My Ancestral Lands and Love Letters to Ukraine from Uyava
In Shannon Vare Christine’s These Walls, the quintessential home of the American Dream stands center as extroverted speaker who narrates “the layered years stored within” the history of the City of Philadelphia in the mid-to-late 1980’s and in the 2020’s, across significant historical events like the 1985 MOVE Bombing of the Cobbs Creek neighborhood and pandemic-era police brutality. Focusing on two families that dwelled within its frames (the Baldwins and McClarens), the house sings from its hearty “homestead soul,” Madonna, The Bangles and Boy George of the 1980’s pop culture and of grainy live-streams, Zoom-cast episodes and interior theater of pandemic-era lockdown. This is an ode to a city where “Go Birds!” and the surface tension of fear and desolation coexist. I admire the inclusion of snippets of conversation that the house remembers with lucidity in the frolic of childhood, especially in contrast to the mothers’ dilemma as they learn and unlearn what they’ve been taught about privilege and to learn how not to allow their whiteness to blind the world. Shannon Vare Christine’s debut poetry collection is a must-read for any reader who has ever fallen in love “with a home, a place,” for its whimsy and heart.
— Tiffany Troy, author of Dominus
Welcome to my haven.
We all need sacred spaces and places of escape. To slow down and tune out the busy, go, go, go, and do, do, do noisy life pace. I am using this small plot of cyberspace to cultivate more pause these days, to share my poetry and reviews. To connect with others and spend time traveling down research rabbit holes.
The rent here is free and you’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like. Till the soil and reap the benefits of your own poetic pause.
