The Mending Worm [Paperback]

Joan Houlihan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2006 | ISBN-10: 1930974590 | ISBN-13: 978-1930974593 | Edition: 1

Poetry. "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 startle-box' of oddment and truths. THE MENDING WORM is a book of stunning accomplishment"--Lucie Brock-Broido. "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..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"--Fred Marchant. Joan Houlihan is author of Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays. She is founding director of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, Massachusetts, where she also teaches.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Mending Worm is a book of stunning accomplishment." -- Lucie Brock-Broido

About the Author

Joan Houlihan is also the author of Hand-Held Executions, Poems & Essays (Del Sol Press, 2003). She is founding director of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, Massachusetts, where she also teaches.

Product Details

• Paperback: 79 pages
• Publisher: New Issues Poetry & Prose; 1 edition (January 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930974590
• ISBN-13: 978-1930974593
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,630,913 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joan Houlihan's most recent book of poetry is The Us (Tupelo Press), named as a "must read" book of 2009 by Massachusetts Center for the Book. She is also author of The Mending Worm, winner of the 2005 Green Rose Award from New Issues Press and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays.

Her work has appeared in many journals, including Boston Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast and Pleiades, among others, and has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2005) and The Book of Irish-American Poetry--Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Her critical essays on contemporary poetry are archived online at Bostoncomment.com. She is managing editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review.

Houlihan is founder of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, Massachusetts and the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference. She has been a visiting professor in Columbia University's graduate MFA Writing Program and Emerson College in Boston. She is on the faculty of Lesley University's Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Winner of the New Issues Green Rose Prize, book offers pleasures as it evokes emotional truths..., December 3, 2006

By 

Allegra Wong (Boston, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Mending Worm (Paperback)

Winner of the New Issues Green Rose Prize, Joan Houlihan's second book offers many pleasures as it evokes its manifold emotional truths, including those connected with mother love, the later states of a love affair, and growing old. Through chiseled language, syntactic twists and word auras, sounds, and her use of the line break--its significance felt in the context of the whole complex physiology of each poem--Houlihan convinces us to believe in each poem's narrator and situation.

Through motherlove of her child, Houlihan's narrator transforms her own personal darkness ("Now come here so I can see / in your eyes the sky within.") yet has offered her child his own flight ("...child at the start of man, / your silhouette tensed in windshield light / and the new way you speak..."). Despair in erotic love is tinged more with sadness than hostility ("There is only one way to speak of this: / as a joy no longer curable"), recognition of a larger love now it is well past first heat ("She is bent to a matter made new, has gone / Intimate, abundant in it."). Rather than resigning herself to growing old, her narrator welcomes new eras. ("Why does the maker keep me awake? / He must want my oddments, their glow.")

Houlihan is required reading for everyone who loves life, poetry, the arts. Like "fears...privately boxed," her poems repel and attract. They stir those lights and darks so deeply ingrained in memory and in imagination.

Allegra Wong

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A passionate, varied, an delightfully consumable collection., November 5, 2006

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mending Worm (Paperback)

Written by award-winning poet Joan Houlihan, The Mending Worm is a free-verse poetry collection of brief verses that nonetheless resonate with the very impression of the moment. Each short poem exquisitely captures the essence of experiencing its subject, from rationing in 1945 to the clumsy motions of a somnambulist to the incurable condition that is ardor. A passionate, varied, an delightfully consumable collection. "Preparing Migration": Perfected in high chambers, massed / among leaves, they are many-bodied / and ready to obey / as air changes to its one right pitch. // Inched into moth-hammered sleeves, / autumn feeds its hundred / as they mince along the branch / unstable in their need to lift, then // all wing and hinge, they raise. / This is the way I want you - / as long-awaited, as sudden.