The Us
"A breathtakingly memorable collection which celebrates the startling things language and story can do. These poems touch on raw power in their invention. With The Us, Joan Houlihan has pushed the possibilities of poetry."--Indiana Review". . . The Us is the Twin Peaks of American poetry... it splits its audience into camps that think it's genius and those that think it's gibberish."  --The Rader Report"The Usis like nothing I have ever read or seen. I thought it impossible to invent anything in poetry . . . the very thing Houlihan has done. These poems are just extraordinary: wildly hewn, classically construed and skewed by an imagined lexicon, but one that, miraculously, works in plain English. In a voice that is elemental, ancient, animistic, pre-lingual even, the speaker manages, with nothing short of magic, to communicate with us, in a language both syntactically inventive and radically simple, about human truths that matter for all time." --Lucie Brock-BroidoNotice for a previous Houlihan book:"Adventuresome collections of contemporary poetry, take note: here's a writer to watch, so be in the forefront and purchase now." --Library Journal"...These rich, dense poems have a magical realist quality in which the objects and occasions of the everyday are transfigured into talismans brimming with meaning and contained yet powerful emotion. [Hers is] a unique and vital voice in contemporary American poetry." --Reginald Shepherd --Reviews