FOREVERHAUS by Kailey Tedesco

“Doppelgänger Blossom” Candle Soy Wax Candle by MARVEL+MOON

Comes in a 4oz. tin

“Doppelgänger Blossom is a Victorian parlor heavy with wilting funerary bouquets. It is a “black magic rose casketed in gold.” It is a vine of jasmine creeping over broken headstones under a full moon. The message this indolic scent sends is one of reincarnation—with death comes decay, with decay comes the return…back to dirt, back to earth, to be born again.” -Trista from Marvel + Moon

SCENT NOTES: Rose. Jasmine. Gardenia. Ylang Ylang. Green Leaves. Powder.

ADORNMENTS: Jasmine Bud & Crushed Rose Petal.

QUOTES ABOUT THE BOOK:

FOREVERHAUS, Kailey Tedesco’s timely examination of domesticity made macabre, conjures the architecture of a dwelling whose vestibules ail, its floorboards imbued with an intimacy matched by such exquisite details as “jadeite bowls” and “a suit of tooth-plaque.” Tedesco grants as much reign to Bloody Mary as she does to language steeped in beadwork of the afterlife. I marveled at ghostlore, cakerot, and “peppermint christ,” while connecting with a narrator who wants “so badly to look like i come from a place / of costumes.” Reading FOREVERHAUS is like attending a Halloween party thrown by Anne Sexton and grimoire’s best clairvoyant. A beautiful eeriness promenades the collection—from Bela Lugosi to Theda Bara, these poems are nostalgically embroidered. There’s even room for Zelda Rubinstein on the guestlist. “Gothic in stature,” Tedesco’s aesthetic makes a home.

—Jon Riccio, Poetry Editor of Fairy Tale Review

Kailey Tedesco’s FOREVERHAUS transforms the body into house, each poem/spell a baroque door between our very human world and the otherworldly haunts of personal memory, familial understanding, and the faith and lore in all that lies between. Tedesco writes, “Once I was inside the / dark, I could experience everything fully”: FOREVERHAUS is a lyric, compassionate haunting that, with every sharp line, will spellbind you toward the glitter and wonderment found in horror.

—Carly Joy Miller, author of Ceremonial

FOREVERHAUS is an immaculate cauldron—here a poet conjures and nests simultaneously, an expectant mother hurriedly preparing for her brood of ghosts. A stir-crazy seance, a haunting with cabin fever, this collection is Tedesco's most accomplished so far. Each word rings out like a dare on an autumn night: ring the doorbell to the haunted house—but take care, or you'll drown.

—Victoria Mier

From the moment I opened Kailey Tedesco’s latest collection, FOREVERHAUS, I knew I was entering an otherworldly place: the “candyhaus,” the “witchhaus,” the “forevereverhaus.” Weaving mystical language with pop-culture from the Jersey Shore, Tedesco creates and explores haunted spaces where she palps the edges of these “witch-shacks.” We ask who is alive, who is the ghost, who is the house? Tedesco tells us, “a ghost is the absence of something/that was once there,/sometimes i think i was born as the absence/of the absence.” The structures of the hauntings become possessed by the human occupant, “a house…gone humanoid.” It is this humanity that Tedesco conjures, “i’d like for my grave to be a dollhouse/replica of this memoryhaus i’m building….” Is it a house without a god? Is it a hated, adored, and temporal body, where “i can be the rest of the house, too…the house where the mother can rest?” Bravo, Kailey Tedesco, for leading us on this haunted journey!“

—Jennifer Martelli, author of My Tarantella and The Uncanny Valley

If there is a ghost only half as beautiful as FOREVERHAUS, I want to know her and let her stay.

—Arielle Tipa, author of Daughter-Seed (Empty Set Press, 2019)