Broken Houses: Poems

Winner of the 2026 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award

In Broken Houses, her fourth collection of poetry, Chelsea Rathburn offers a powerful meditation on home and the foundations--both physical and metaphorical, stable and unstable--that shape us. Drawing upon historical records, contemporary art, family photographs, and memory, Rathburn explores the settlement of the city of Miami, as well as her father's placement in a California foster home, to tell larger stories of dispossession and erasure.

At a time when the American Dream seems all the more unreachable, the poems in Broken Houses urge us to hold tight to one another and build connections where we can.