Books
Full-length collections and ongoing book-length projects.
At last, we listen closely: cryptic crossword poems is available for preorder from Black Spring Press.
The pressure of all that light is available from Rebel Satori Press and Amazon.
My Pet Sounds Off: Translating the Beach Boys is available from Finishing Line Press and Amazon.
Excerpts from a Natural History is available from Titus Books and Amazon.
At last, we listen closely: cryptic crossword poems
At last, we listen closely: cryptic crossword poems brings together two favorite pastimes: reading poetry and doing crossword puzzles. In this collection, Holly Painter invents an original form: solvable interconnected poems based on the wordplay-inflected cryptic crosswords found in British newspapers and around the world.
Excerpts from a Natural History
When the British natural philosophers of the 17th century founded modern natural history, they proposed finding a poet to compile a poetic account of everything that existed in nature, very broadly defined. Four hundred years later, the work is ongoing, made modern and rigorous with rules and style-guides, managers and research-poets.
“Holly Painter is a trickster poet, you never know where she’s going next. Sometimes she wants to lick your ear. Over the page she might chew your leg off.” - John Newton (Family Songbook; Lives of the Poets)
“There are two writers of this book: a lyricist and a scientist. One might think they would be at odds with each other, because they are. Painter’s poems are punctuated by the commentary of a highly analytic logician. The unremitting voice of reason is given voice, like an alien attempting a study of human emotion in the margins. This book is actually two books. You should read it with you and yourself.” - Paul Legault (The Tower; Lunch Poems 2; Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror 2)
My Pet Sounds Off: Translating the Beach Boys
My Pet Sounds Off "translates" 35 popular Beach Boys songs from English to English, updating, editorializing, and goofing around with the poppy lyrics of the world's favorite surf band.
“My Pet Sounds Off is a delightful re-imagining of the Beach Boys’ catalog. Holly Painter draws new meaning out of Brian Wilson’s classics, from the profound to the profoundly hilarious.” - Erik Didriksen (Pop Sonnets)
“In this amusing response to the Beach Boys’ oeuvre, Holly Painter addresses the toxic stupidity of the all-American boy-man - the surfer-bro with a hard-on for life but no substantial understanding of how the world works. Fortunately, the words of these naive, lustful men are paired with Holly’s astute analysis of the Boys’ motives and desires. Holly’s playful translations offer a celebration of the Boys’ original vigor, but thankfully, here, they are reinvigorated by a poet’s wit and perspective.” - Frances Cannon (Walter Benjamin Reimagined: A Graphic Translation of Poetry, Prose, Aphorisms, and Dreams; The Highs and Lows of Shape-Shift Ma and Big Little Frank)
“Ever wonder what the apparently romantic line "Though life would still go on, believe me" actually means? Translation: "I would not commit suicide / but I would be very tempted." Painter’s hilarious translations bridge the gulf between classic Beach Boys songs in your ear and those same classic songs on the page, presenting some of the band’s most enigmatic work with zero ambiguity. Just as Brian Wilson tapped into those "pet" sounds others couldn’t hear, Painter makes audible the base logics and illogics that accompany all that auditory experiment. "Oomm dot dit it." Translation: "telegram sounds." Painter’s pet tells you exactly what you need to hear.” - Penelope Cray (Miracles Come on Mondays)
The pressure of all that light
Holly Painter's third collection charts a course through the tender friendships and lonely queer crushes of childhood and adolescence in Midwestern America and on to the dizzying freedoms of California and the disorientation of love and heartache in New Zealand. Energetic and intimate, these poems blend the personal and the pastoral in their exploration of how we arrive at ourselves.
“These are poems with narrative tension, imagery sensuous and sleek as peach slices in sweet clear syrup, poems that explore the apparently small shocks and nicks of childhood experience that in reality are formative, in turns eroding and galvanising; poems that move into the ruminative and receptive mode of a hard-won adulthood, too. The collection is a gorgeously crafted, painfully moving catalogue of acute perceptions and growth into, or realisation of identity in a society that is still aggressively layered with bigotry and ignorance - and yet which also offers pockets of empathy and love. I found myself rocked, racked, elated and tearful in such quick succession with this collection that it was easy at first to overlook the technical grace and robustness in the poems: but it is there, strong and supple, both helping to carry us over waves of grief, and to drive us through an at times almost ecstatic series of observations of the human carnival.” - Emma Neale (To the Occupant; The Pink Jumpsuit; Billy Bird)
“Tackling travel, gender, young love, sex, and a rocky emergence from childhood through adolescence and into a vibrantly rendered adulthood, The pressure of all that light is a swaggeringly beautiful account of a person in the process of becoming. The language of this collection ranges from spare and spot on to lush and imaginative, and never fails to surprise. Painter’s poems span across years, states and varying landscapes and, as readers, we willingly follow with such a deft hand to guide us. I trust few poets to delve as steadily and meticulously into the mechanics of the human heart as Holly Painter. This collection is a stunning accomplishment.” - Meg Reynolds (Does the Earth; A Comic Year)
“Holly Painter’s poems keep adding to memory like a brush, painting over layers, such that if you scratch the surface it’s striped with history. Real life is made of words, and there are no words for exactly how to say how it feels: to fall in love in a foreign place, to live between genders, to be a human all this time, except maybe all these ones together. The pressure of all this light is the pressure to see everything. Here, on this planet, there is too much to see, and it all goes so well together.” - Paul Legault (The Tower; Lunch Poems 2; Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror 2)