Celebrate new poetry by the women of Empty Bowl Press, Holly J. Hughes, Shin Yu Pai, and Ann Spiers. Their poems define what is fragile, threatened, and all in all, widely spiritual in our natural environment. Shin Yu Pai’s Virga offers Buddhist thought from lived experience; Ann Spiers’ Rain Violent captures climate crisis in quatrains linked with weather symbols; and Holly J. Hughes’ Hold Fast celebrates the “ten thousand sorrows and ten thousand joys” she invites us all to hold fast. Empty Bowl Press’s mission is to publish writers dedicated to the love and preservation of human communities in wild places. As poets of Empty Bowl Press, they believe the climate crisis affects all living beings…people, animals, plants, natural systems. They find it urgent as poets to join other writers at Get Lit! to speak about these effects.
Poetry. In Holly J. Hughes's second full-length collection, HOLD FAST, she turns her attention to challenging times both personally and politically, asking in an epigraph: What will we cling to in the confusion of the tides? What structures of connection will hold us in place?
Adamantine bristles with taut, startling language that continues to yield surprises even after readers realize that they are at serious play within the fields of the human heart, a realm in which 'we must know when to give in.'-Carolyne Wright
RAIN VIOLENT views the earth and its creatures in crisis. Each page holds one short poem paired with a weather symbol. The symbols inject the poems with a depth, a counterpoint, a link to specific climate phenomena. The sixty poems are essentially about climate crisis: political, mythical, surrealistic, scientific, personal.
The poems in Back Cut are set in the Pacific Northwest, particularly Washington State. The time is immediately after WWII, when the heyday of logging and harvesting razor clams has passed and people eke out a living on what is left of these natural resources. Back Cut is a love story. Through alternating monologues, husband and wife reveal themselves.