Reviews
Review by: Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of RENDER / AN APOCALYPSE and AMERICAN PURGATORY - July 10, 2024
"Holly Haworth's THE WAY THE MOON shares its being with the moon itself, and the poems know what the moon knows: that the light we shine is never ours alone. Each new line break, breath, and page takes me further into the truth that even the smallest of us, and the most hurting, carry the whole Earth within. Or, as the poet writes, 'Love is not born once but must / give birth to itself again & again.' This astonishing debut lives in my heart next to Louise Glück's THE WILD IRIS and CD Wright's CASTING DEEP SHADE. Haworth has given us transformation, a true work of art."
Review by: G.C. Waldrep, author of THE EARLIEST WITNESSES - July 10, 2024
"Holly Haworth's collection is a gorgeous recital of 'clear-throated singing,' a hymn to and for a creation that has not yet (despite humankind's best intentions) been divested of the numinous. What does one do when a place becomes 'everything I needed?' One needs more, and better; differently, and in present tense. The sumptuous poems record the fulfillment and enlargement of a desire that is both satiated by and reflected urgently in the observed world, the all that is not-I, the not-self. Their opulence gleams and rings in the 'cast-iron night.'"
Review by: Anne Haven McDonnell, author of BREATH ON A COAL and recipient of a 2023 NEA Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing - July 10, 2024
"In Holly Haworth's debut book of poems, the speaker whispers, 'I am abandoned to the land.' And this quiet abandonment allows multitudes of beings of the Blue Ridge Mountains to shimmer and speak. I trust Haworth's earned bodily intimacy, with her 'basketsful of nettle / armsful of fennel,' the lived knowing, the sorrowful and ecstatic inside these poems. I want to read these lyric spells by candlelight, by moonlight: slip from human habit and disperse into this enchanted, tangled wild place."
Review by: Abraham Smith, author of INSOMNIAC SENTINEL and DEAR WEIRDO - July 10, 2024
"THE WAY THE MOON spellbinds. The poems yearn. And yodel. The poems see. And pine. Together we wander with Haworth over her homeland loams. Somewhere Dorothy Wordsworth keeps time with an apple-switch while Dock Boggs sings like a coyote full of rabbit and rain. Haworth gifts us nothing short of the sublime. I had to sit while reading these poems because they floored me. I had to stand and do a little dance because Haworth's music would not let my knees keep still. Such is the fecund gambol you are in for, Dear Reader. And I have a mind to plant each and all of her heirloom words. And I'll be hoping for a rhubarb the size of a cathedral. Let's all meet there soon. Next full moon."