This is the house that Kathryn Maris built: it has “only an attic and a basement”. What does it signify to have a bodiless house? The title is typical of this crisp, funny, lightly disturbing collection. Maris is a mistress of fragile structures. A wit informs her sometimes painful, mannered poems – their affectation a coping strategy. What Women Want is formed by layered futility: the woman’s superstitious initiative rendered null by the husband’s incurious loftiness. It plays with the pointlessness of its subject until the poem becomes the point. The charm of the book is that it is the poems themselves that offer stability. It is they that bridge – where a bridge is possible – the gap between the sexes (“The man in the basement wrote stories about heroin/ the woman in the attic read stories with heroines”). This is the gap that keeps threatening to become a void.

How to Be a Dream Girl Not a Doormat about the “Ex’’ is a particularly satisfying poem: flat-packed with entertaining, wise advice about how to handle the subject of ex-partners:

Remember you’re a prize, so you needn’t report that your ex
stole appliances or defaulted on child support or that your ex
has a Mafioso brother doing time for racketeering or that your ex
is “still stalking you” – because your man will not find these ex
stories charming, if he’s classy, so what you say about your ex
is simply, “We wanted different things” or, alternatively, “My ex
and I went separate ways.”

Her amusing conclusion is that “inquiring minds don’t need to know”. The past’s diverse baggage is unpacked at a lick – in order to advise that it be withheld in a new relationship. She uses ordinary speech in a hyper-controlled way as if speed talking: an astonishing amount is incorporated in a single poem.

The House of Atreus (another house with insecure foundations) is a sequence that leans on Greek mythology to describe a dysfunctional family – presumably her own. Maris revels in anachronistic detail, describing Electra at JFK airport: “Immigration queues, misplaced bags, then Orestes didn’t turn up so I hailed a taxi.” Sometimes this seems too easy as entertainment (Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife is a hard act to follow). But there is a memorable poem about Iphigenia: “I bought flowers on the Clifton Road/ Because I think I might be dead?/ The severe light and wind are exactly/ as they were when I was a little/ girl and I wrote DANGER on an oak…” The sense that Iphigenia is sacrificed by narrative itself is arresting; she asks herself whether she has survived her own story.

This is a collection in which psychoanalytic parlance is an accessory, a neurotic ornament (the Freudian slips in). (“Ms C was given further tests to rule out Capgras Syndrome and was advised to seek one-on-one therapy for future monitoring of her moods and delusions.”) And speaking of ornament, there is an outstanding poem about a dress: Object wears its history well, becomes a subject. Equally compelling is The Death of Empiricism, a poem of undeceived momentum, which warns against taking anything at face value: “If Shakespeare wrote about a woman dressed as a man dressed as a /woman dressed as a man, perhaps he wasn’t considering gender at all.” It ends: “That your daughter asks for a glass of milk while you are reading/ her this poem does not mean it is without sustenance.”

Agreed – the same could be said for every poem in this assured, precarious, sustaining collection.

• The House With Only an Attic and a Basement by Kathryn Maris is published by Penguin (£7.99). To order a copy for £6.79 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

What Women Want

After my best friend read a self-help book called Make Your Own
Fairy Tale in which the author advises you to write your wish in a

notebook and store it in the drawer of your bedside table, I did exactly
that. One day my other half said, “For fuck’s sake I don’t understand
what you want.” When I suggested he look at the notebook in the
bedside table, where my wish had been collecting dust for 3 years, he
revealed he would never look at someone’s private notebook, he was
above that, and that was the end of the conversation.