Calluses (chapbook)

I Would Burn Someone's House Down For You is an upcoming chapbook by American poet Matthew Little. It will be Little's second physical release, and fifth overall.

Background
Little began writing For You in December of 2017, during a creative period where he was also hard at work writing his to-be-debut novel Teddy Bears. On Facebook, he revealed he had written three poems in one night, although only two of them made it in. He had hoped to write about 40 poems and make it a full-length collection, but around April 2019, after he worked on it on and off for more than a year, accumulating 24 poems, Little decided where he was with it was sufficient enough to keep it at chapbook level.

Themes
When it was first being worked on, Little focused mainly on the unresolved guilt he felt about how his relationship with his ex-boyfriend ended. As he carried that feeling throughout its writing, Little shaped For You to be "a way of [him] saying hi and bye to the whole situation, to let everyone involved know that it's still a thing [he] thinks about even if it's been years since".

Among his feeling of guilt, there are also poems that revisit his dealing with an alcoholic mother in a somewhat explicit manner. In one, "Putting The Kitten In Her Litter Box", Little equates potty training his kitten to when he would watch over his mother as she let herself go while out of her mind drunk.