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THOUGH THE WALLS ARE LIT

THOUGH THE WALLS ARE LIT

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9991994-9-7

Pub Date: Mar. 2020

Pages: 66


By Emily Holt


Though the Walls Are Lit considers the Irish tradition of hunger strikes and vocal lament. Weaving together hymns, canticles, and blues riffs, Holt configures the page as a threshold where poet and stranger may meet in protest and supplication.


The voice in Though The Walls Are Lit is mesmerizing, unsettling, and profoundly honest. Emily Holt has found what poetry at its best can be: a way of speaking—which is also a way of surviving. With two homelands, she distills a language to confront the demons of memory, the mysteries of identity, the inheritance of a history of violence and losses (Know where you are Here No where/No place the dead won’t go). Reading the first part of the collection is like following someone through a waking dream edged by nightmare. The untitled poems are as urgent as a whisper, yet image after image detonates. The second part centers on the poet’s return to her Irish town of Arklow, carrying the burden of the past and the exile of the present with her. Though the Walls Are Lit explores geographies of the soul, evoking a tradition of hunger strikes, imprisonment, and pain borne by bodies, notably female:


[And I could sing but—

only this kind of body

can have water break from it]


This is not the work of a newcomer, but a smart and accomplished artist, unafraid of darkness. Holt’s extended elegy for her past, her family, and her people has almost the force of liturgy. This remarkable collection shines with Yeats’s “terrible beauty.”

—Stan Sanvel Rubin


    To Thee Do I Come

    December and other months

    to cleanse. Cedar-bodies

    to sway. Remember Cyprus Avenue?

    Child-like in our suede coats

    fur boots, us all light-

    strings, you with your camera

    Why bother with drink

    or bleeding when neither

    are a sign of what’s to come?

    I will listen. I will listen

    and you will search each crease

    in your hand, and I shall see the rubble

    for the house and the wanting

    shall be enough


    —Emily Holt


    Raised in northern California, Emily Holt has worked as a journalist in the U.S. and Ireland. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and a Master of Letters in Literature from Trinity College University of Dublin. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Best New British and Irish Poets, Talking River, and other publications. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

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