Amy Hollowell’s Here We Are (Presses Universitaires De Rouen Et Du Havre, 2015)

Amy Hollowell’s 131 page poem, divided into many parts of varying lengths and fragmentation with titles in normal, bold and italics, employs rhythm and repetition, without juxtaposition, in a spirit of continuous venture.

I’m thinking that a poem could go on forever like a nap under / a vine
….
I’m thinking that it could be a burning with weekday thoughts / of hot elsewheres

Grounded in Zen Buddhist meditation and journalism for the International Herald Tribune, Amy Hollowell’s long poem is an exploration of what it is to be alive in the present. The multitudinous nature of the self, under pressure and implicitly alienated from the world is here construed as a narrative with a necessary imperative to focus upon what is not said as much as what is said. Hollowell sees the private and personal as ever present in the public and impersonal and seeks to bear…