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.
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.
