Description
Joan Houlihan is the author of five books of poetry. Her poems have been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press) and The Book of Irish-American Poetry-Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press). She has been a contributing critic for the Contemporary Poetry Review, associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and author of a series of essays on contemporary American poetry archived online at bostoncomment.com. Her teaching includes Columbia University, Smith College, and Emerson College. She currently teaches in the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA Program. She is also Professor of Practice at Clark University in Worcester, MA. Houlihan is founder and director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.
“How strange and hewn and scarified these poems are! In her drive to claim the singularity of her own singed (and searing) fables, Joan Houlihan has composed a brilliant ‘black startlebox’ of oddment and truths. The Mending Worm is a book of stunning accomplishment.”
“Joan Houlihan’s images and figures are lapidary, her diction alert and startling, her lines chiseled, their sounds echoing back and forth, and yet for all the exquisite craft in these poems, there is something terrible and wild underneath their surfaces. Feral animals are prowling through them. Her typical landscape is a desolate, snowy shoreline. ‘What the sea dredges up in the dark’ writes Houlihan, ‘is sand tooth, fishbone, spine, / hard fruit of tide.’ So too this book delivers hard news. There are murderers about to be executed, and cancers to be survived maybe. Injury and pain is at the heart of being, but as the title poem tells us, there is also a mending impulse, a restoration to be humbly sought or created. It is something, as Houlihan writes, ‘we can do together.’ The Mending Worm gives us poems that in their art and authenticity render whole that which has been shattered. Read them and you will see.”
