The house Chelsea Rathburn grew up in still stands in Palmetto Bay, and her parents still own it. And now it anchors her fourth poetry collection, Broken Houses, published Wednesday, July 29, by Louisiana State University Press.

"I was just about to go into kindergarten and we got this house in Palmetto Bay," Rathburn told WLRN in an interview published the same day.

Rathburn, born in 1975, is Georgia's poet laureate and a creative writing professor at Mercer University in Macon. But the 90-page collection looks south, drawing on family photographs, historical records, and memory to explore what "home" means when the ground beneath it keeps shifting.

The poems connect her family's experience of growing up poor in that Palmetto Bay house with Miami's overlooked history, including erased Indigenous sites and the Black laborers who built early Miami. Her father's placement in a California foster home as a child surfaces alongside those larger stories of dispossession.

Broken Houses won the 2026 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award before publication. Rathburn's previous collection, Still Life with Mother and Knife (2019), was named a New York Times "New & Noteworthy" selection and won the 2020 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry. NPR called her work "arresting" in a 2019 feature.

Born in Jacksonville and raised in Miami, Rathburn was appointed Georgia's poet laureate by Governor Brian Kemp in 2019. In 2021 she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, the New Republic, and Ploughshares.

The publisher describes the collection as a call to build connections at a time when the American Dream feels increasingly out of reach. For Palmetto Bay readers, those connections start with the street they may share with Rathburn's family.

Broken Houses is available through Louisiana State University Press and major booksellers.

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