In Nicky Beer's The Diminishing House, birds are disemboweled, a father is mourned, and a basement fills with snakes. This first book of resonant lyric poetry meditates on such subjects as animals, art, and anatomy, and transforms the familiar and mundane into something strangely
mythic. Beer explores the exhilaration and frustration of living in a sensuous, unstable world filled with grief and desire.