Between Us
In Between Us, Holly Wren Spaulding’s latest chapbook of poems, she offers the salvation of beauty amidst sorrow for who and what has been lost in recent years.
“Each poem in Holly Wren Spaulding’s exquisite new collection is an offering of flowers—some cut from the garden, others gathered wild from a field; some intricately arranged, others a single stem placed in a vase on the windowsill, the bedside table. All, however, afford us the pleasure of care having been taken, of beauty having been salvaged amid desolation, and shared. To read these poems is to be reminded of the consolations always available to us, if only we take the time to notice, as Holly has, with an eye both clear and kind, capable of seeing things as they are around and between us, and of giving them their due attention, due reverence. In other words, they show us how to be and how to bask–in the world, and in our lives—even and especially as they threaten to come to an end. ‘This means we have not forsaken / what exists between us.‘ Pure loveliness. An existential as well as an artistic achievement.”— Brit Washburn, author, Notwithstanding: Poems
Published in 2022 by Alice Greene & Co.
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Fire
In Fire, Spaulding evokes elemental imagery and emotions, simultaneities and silences, to hint at experiences which can strike like lightning, and extinguish just as fast. Each page is an open field, the spare lines both intimate and mysterious.
“This work is a singular gorgeous poem, channeled through a writer who is herself a living, breathing poem. I know the flames contained in these pages, can smell their approach, and Holly Wren Spaulding, with her heart always outside her chest, is the herald of a scorching I can be grateful for.” — Chris La Tray, author of One Sentence Journal and a memoir from Milkweed Editions, Becoming Little Shell, forthcoming in 2022
From the author:
In her translation of Sappho's fragments, Anne Carson used brackets to represent missing matter: words that are incomplete or illegible in the original papyrus. This was an aesthetic gesture, Carson explained, implying a "free space of imaginal adventure."
When I read about her process all those years ago, I was taken. I needed space for what isn't or can't be said, and for which there is only feeling.
The open spaces in Fire can be read as white heat; the stretching hours and years in which certain events, whether real or imagined, lived in the imagination, and vibrated beyond.
These fragments are husks of places and people in a burning landscape. The elements. Bodies resonating according to unseen frequencies. Attempts to say what it was like. The residue of what was felt. —Holly Wren Spaulding, Summer 2021
Designed and digitally typeset in Adobe Jenson Pro at St Brigid Press. Interior pages digitally printed at Bailey Printing, Inc., Charlottesville, Virginia. Text block hand-sewn at St Brigid Press (7.25” tall x 4.25” wide). End papers are hand-marbled in India. Jacket letterpress printed on St Armand handmade paper at St Brigid Press.
Published July 2021.
Familiars
“In these brushstroke poems, Holly Wren speaks with the fine-tuned force exhibited by the masters of concision. By touching the essential with such delicate linguistic energy, an entire world balances on her pages: vital and tender and alive. Her stanzas illuminate the white-spaced world of the page with hawk-crested beauty, with acorn, beech, heron, newt. Holly Wren’s interactions with language and the natural world are like a light that is always new, or a bird’s quick and stunning song—look, here, look here, here, here.”—Anne-Marie Oomen, author, Uncoded Woman: Poems
Evocative and intimate, the linked poems in Familiars arise from questions and observations in the more than human world. In her characteristically compact lyrics—little essences—Holly writes about trees, flowers, magic, touch, memory, erasure, power, and her grief over the changing climate.
“To read Familiars is to be reminded that seeing and noticing is a practice, an act of patience, a way to know our place in a world larger than, yet connected to ourselves. In Familiars, poet Holly Wren Spaulding catalogues and bears witness to the living world, weaving together what is said and unsaid: within the quality of elegy, there is also a call to speak and act, to live while we are here, and most of all, to pay attention. We are living in a time that requires clear sight and courage. Spaulding’s poems create and sustain us with their “thrum that needs no translation.” —Sejal Shah, author of This Is One Way to Dance: Essays
Some of the poems in Familiars were first seen in public during Holly’s artist residency at the Leelanau Cultural Center, Spring 2017. This was not long after the Oxford Junior Dictionary dropped a number of common words, names of flora and fauna, as they needed the space for newer words from the world of technology, such as ‘chatroom’. The title of each poem displayed was one of these displaced words.
Familiars now brings you a selection of these poems in which Holly takes us on a three-part journey, a travelogue of sorts, providing close observations of the natural world and our relationship to it. Each poem still provides a word from nature as its title and a jumping off point for the poem; what does it feel, how does it look, what tales can it tell. A story for this and all times.
Published by Alice Greene & Company, 2020
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If August
“If August is an astonishing work of beauty, stunning moment by moment. I was affected by and loved the white space and spareness, which is not so much spareness as a kind of marvelous focus, all of which to me seemed chosen and arranged with such care. The interludes, if you will, between pages. It gives an image a kind of vivid immediacy, and I want to absorb each image, page, before moving to the next. And the image, moment, becomes astonishing.”—Brad Watson, author, Miss Jane
“It’s like a 300-page novel in 100 words and I keep thinking about how inviting this book is — that the reader is invited in as a partner but without being expected to do all the work. A work of such generosity. I guess I continue to puzzle over the fact that there is so much in so little. I haven’t admired any new book as much in years, or to that effect. It’s true! It’s riveting! I cannot say more about the book than Holly does in the book!”—Elinor Nauen, author of My Marriage A-Z: A Big City Romance
If August is an extended luminous poem evoking the sensuality of late summer entwined with unexpected narrative and rhythm. Spare and suggestive, the work’s innovative form creates a new and singular experience for readers.
Published by Alice Greene & Company, 2017
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Most days this is enough.
The fragrance alone,
the fractal shapes,
and the way such small things
will open and keep opening.
from BETWEEN US, 2022
Elemental
Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction comes to us from twenty-three of Michigan's most well-known essayists. A celebration of the elements, this collection is both the storm and the shelter. In her introduction, editor Anne-Marie Oomen recalls the "ritual dousing" of her storytelling group's bonfire: "wind, earth, fire, water-all of it simultaneous in that one gesture. . . . In that moment we are bound together with these elements and with this place, the circle around the fire on the shores of a Great Lake closes, complete."
Holly’s essay, “The Language of Trees” was included in this collection of creative nonfiction published by Wayne State University Press, 2019.
The Michigan Poet
The Michigan Poet publishes poems by Michigan poets on posters in their local communities as well as on their website: This collection contains poetry from the first five years of poetry printing and activism.
This book contains Holly’s poem “Ago.”
Published 2015.
Pilgrim
“These beautiful poems exude an elegant calm, a dolce, that is rare in contemporary poetry and even more rarified in what passes for society. The voice is pure “nightfall…a long blue dress,” and the images enact what a philosopher referred to as sudden salience on the psyche. A chicken picking windfall pears. Two children quiet as mint. Holly Wren Spaulding takes, in the words of Li Po, “the earth for a pillow and the great heaven as a coverlet,” and wakes with these gentle but poignant poems.”— Chris Dombrowski, author
Pilgrim is made from filaments of moss, lover’s sweat, tannic smoke. These are quiet poems set in varied landscapes, from an arboretum in spring, to a New England orchard, to the Atlantic sea coast. They are epistles from the interior life and memory of a solitary and sometimes stoic narrator interested in where and how the mundane meets the metaphysical.
Their brevity and spareness points to limitations and lack, but also to the potency of all that’s held back, the not said; the blank spaces that inhabit and surround these poems resonate with themes of desire and belonging, separateness and exile.
Under the influence of ancient Japanese forms like the haiku and tanka, Pilgrim constructs meaning from encounters in nature, or scenes viewed from a window; these poems observe the things and routines of the world—polar bears in a changing environment or the daily chore of washing dishes—and pronounces all of it sacred.
“The page, the line breaks, the content of the poems themselves--they all leave space for something more...and that space is filled where the reader meets the poet on the page and meanings and interpretations mingle.” —Katey Schultz, author of Still Come Home
Published by Alice Greene & Company, 2014
The Grass Impossibly
“Holly has dedicated herself to making the world a more livable place for all its inhabitants—human and otherwise. In these writings you will find the depth and passion she brings to all aspects of her life, and nourishment from the soul of an activist for anyone who cares about life in planet earth.” —Michael Franti, musician and director of I Know I’m Not Alone: A Musician’s Search for the Human Cost of War
“Holly Wren Spaulding’s poems are lush, sensual and transporting; full of the intersections of beauty and heartbreak. The Grass Impossibly is a fearless, striking collection.”—Davy Rothbart, author of The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, and contributor to This American Life.
The Grass Impossibly was selected by Fleda Brown for the 2008 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook Award in Poetry.
We Are Everywhere
“This is the first book to truly capture and embody the exuberant creativity and radical intellect of the protest movements.”—Naomi Klein, from the foreword
We Are Everywhere is a whirlwind collection of writings, images and ideas for direct action by people on the frontlines of the global anticapitalist movement. This is a movement of untold stories, because those from below are not those who get to write history, even though we are the ones making it. We Are Everywhere wrenches our history from the grasp of the powerful and returns it to the streets, fields and neighborhoods where it was made.
Holly’s interview with South African writer and liberation fighter, Ashwin Desai, is included in this book.
Published by Verso, 2003.