Angelique Zobitz’s Burn down your house  is a collection of erasure poems taken from Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention: the Story of a Marriage. Rather than make L’Engle’s experiences disappear, Zobitz builds a dialogue between the two couples’ stories of love in the face of trauma and loss. Her erasures painstakingly make both narratives visible, allowing the different but sympathetic relationships to interact on the page.

In this collection, “burning” is the controlled burn of an experienced forester rather than an act of reckless arson. In the chapbook’s title poem, we’re told that “one of us will / kill / the / ‘we’” in a blaze of anger. But the images of that fire—”the fire of roses /  a burning bush / tongues of fire”—betray a type of incineration that creates beauty, new covenants, and the gift of a previously unknown language.

Each person in this “we” brings to the relationship their own histories. In “We All Live in a House on Fire” the speaker remarks: “How different . . . each of us / different treasures, different sorrows.” Yet, even while navigating these differences, the speaker remains grounded in the ways pain can make way for deeper healing. In “It Was a Pleasure to Burn” we read: “we will not worry . . . and I am more than willing to break.”

This clear-eyed faith in the working out of a complex love leads us into poems of truce and bridging differences. Here in deep breaths before speaking and morning routines, we find ways to walk through the fire. Even more, we discover we can find comfort in it, so that “looking at the flames / gives the same peace as looking at / the ocean waves rolling in to the shore.”

Zobitz and L’Engle have no delusions about building a fireproof marriage. “The years,” their blended voices tell us “are deeply rooted / wicks.” There is always the careless spark that could set everything ablaze again. But this new “we” knows things about fire and themselves that they did not know before. In this new love, we can stand in the midst of any conflagration, “beloved / still with me.”