Holly Wren Spaulding
November 202054 pages, paperback
$16.00
ISBN 978-1-935770-22-0
Holly Wren Spaulding‘s third book of poetry with the press is Familiars. Evocative and intimate, the linked poems 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.
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.
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