Winner of the 2005 Green Rose Prize in 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. Feral animals are prowling through them. Her typical landscape is a desolate, snowy shoreline. ‘What the sea dredges up in the dark’ writes Houlihan, ‘is sand tooth, fishbone, spine, / hard fruit of tide.’ So too this book delivers hard news. There are murderers about to be executed, and cancers to be survived maybe. Injury and pain is at the heart of being, but as the title poem tells us, there is also a mending impulse, a restoration to be humbly sought or created. It is something, as Houlihan writes, ‘we can do together.’ 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

"First and foremost, these are poems of passion. Clean and spare, they are rich in image, hungrily appropriating the things of this world in order to express the other world. Implicit in many is a kind of harrowing force of love: love of a lover, love of God; the two intermx. And yet despite this the poems are remarkably subtle. Longing, lust, adoration, yes, but all in tightly controlled lines."

         —Ellen Wehle, West Branch, Spring/Summer 2006

"A passionate, varied, and delightfully consumable collection." —Midwest Book Review

"Houlihan consistently shapes her messages within an elegant and lyrical language of landscape or other aspects of nature. She frequently forms eloquent statements with descriptive words one could say approach painterly patterns containing attributes with vivid scenery and careful attention to tone or texture. In addition, Houlihan’s exact and intricate sentences are written using a technique filled with various tactics of lyricism—alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rhyme, deliberate rhythm, and delicate echoes of sound from line to line. Consequently, though Houlihan mostly avoids any end rhyme, her pieces are subtly just as musical." (full text)

         —Edward Byrne, Editor of Valparaiso Poetry Review

"Joan Houlihan's glistringly rewarding The Mending Worm oppositely takes acuity and intensity of feeling not as its ends, but points of departure. Houlihan's poems pursue the trajectory of lyricism in reverse: the labor of acquiring indifference, pining for rather than transcending narcosis of feeling."

         — Michael Snediker, Pleiades

Praise for Hand-Held Executions, Poems & Essays:

“Joan Houlihan’s 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. Grounded in the phenomenal world and blurring at the edges into other worlds just beyond sight, these poems traverse great distances in a narrow space. They have a rare music of language and imagery, and a striking sense of necessity and controlled passion.”

         —Reginald Shepherd

“Joan Houlihan is a uniquely talented poet and it is time for a collection of her writings. I have valued them for a long time (and I am not the only one) and enjoyed in them what I can only call a rage that refuses to settle for stunned silence and numbness but has been honed, or honed itself, to a fierce clarity and penetrated beyond itself into a new kind of tenderness, earned and believable. Blended with this admirable clarity is a witty and irreverent critical intelligence determined to see and say its truth, and prepared to endure the rewards of doing so.

         —Franz Wright

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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