American Ready Cut System Houses By Heather Derr-Smith

Birds return to their nests at the end of a long day. Squirrels go hiding in the trees and bears slowly move back to their cave. Humans too, return to their home at the end of the day, the home is where the heart really is, right? American Ready Cut System Houses by Heather Derr-Smith juxtaposes the “old” and the “new” houses to create a conflict within the narrator, and uses song as a symbol to convey to the reader that the idea of having something to call home is responsible for one’s sense of identity and their belonging, exemplified by the character’s connection to the old in spite of still wanting to stay with the new. The poem has a multitude of aspects to it. One central, but a confusing symbol is song. The ability of the narrator

Singing doesn’t seem as if it is that big of a deal here, but the narrator is missing the ability and that holds symbolic significance. She cannot talk or sing because something is missing that is integral to her doing so and that something is her identity- a part of which was lost to her old house. We only see the extent of this loss here, but later she writes that “Dead is the mandible, alive the song...” (Derr-Smith 38) a reference to Lolita’s author Vladimir Nabokov’s line in a poem. The line conveys that although the jaw is “dead” in a sense it is the song coming out from it that makes something feel alive- connecting back to the song as a symbol of identity. Her loss of ability to sing, or feel “alive” is representing her loss of identity, explaining her making an effort to escape her problems by being drunk when she is asked to sing.

After doing some outside research it seems American System built houses (or American Ready Cut System) were supposed to be an easy, quick, beautiful, and cheap alternative to the homes at the time. This can be connected back to the second line of the poem in which Derr-Smith writes, “Blueprints, sketches, such perfect houses in the photograph on/the front”(3-4). These are the new houses, the American system built ones that look new and clean. They are a symbol for what her new identity should be however, the juxtaposition comes in, when immediately after the narrator starts, “searching for home, hit the road, looking for the exact spot of my birthright/down the rustling path of thistles and nettles”(Derr-Smith 7-8). Although the narrator is looking at the new houses, there still is this desire to look for her old home and the old memories that it contains- this gives the old home a symbolic importance as well as it represents her old identity and her attraction to it. To the “supper table” that they used to hide under, all of these are memories that compose her identity. The desire is stimulated by her identity that remains in her old house, which is enveloped in the larger idea that the concept of home, connects to who she is as a whole. Derr-Smith writes, “The bones of our houses, the house of our bones- the core of our home and home of our core dropped/ in a sudden blur of