The Counting House

Poetry. Akin to a bookkeeper's accounting of what's given and taken in a fraught, uncertain exchange, THE COUNTING HOUSE goes on to record the pageantry and pedantry of courtly affection gone awry. Symbols and origins of traditional rhymes involving kings and queens serve as inventory, alongside elements of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. In forensic sequences of inquisition, scrutiny, and reckoning, Ridley reveals the maiden as muse as modern darling--unhoused and exacting--in "all of her violet forms." "Sandra Ridley has revealed our closest contradictions in poems where harm is exhausted in both pleasure and pain. These poems find a blackbird baked into a pie, and our own drooling expectation of dessert, the edible object, is replaced by the excitement of the bird that escapes it, somehow alive. We revel in the spectre of the creature's death and resurrection. How close we are to pain and destruction here, but Ridley surprises us with life that stubbornly and lovingly continues. In language that soothes and bites word by word, THE COUNTING HOUSE is a book that lives fiercely in the complex in-between of love and punishment, pleasure and pain, coo and cry."--Jenny Sampirisi

Set in the middle of last century, at the height of the Empire this book follows the lives of Rohini and Vidia, growing up and getting married in a small Indian village, before being seduced by tales of the promised land and the riches they will find there.

One by one, ten children move from their old house into their new house with all their possessions. Die-cut windows reveal the interiors of the houses and the book can also be read from back to front.

Treats everyday aspects of economic, social and intellectual life of the Quakers of Philadelphia.

'The Counting House' is a tale of black magic and murder set in rural Scotland in the 1970s.