Overview

Blue Diagonals by Lucy Holme is an intimate and powerful exploration of love, loss, and healing. Holme's evocative prose transports the reader through a landscape of raw emotion, drawing on personal history and memory to illuminate the fragility and resilience of the human spirit. This remarkable debut blends memoir and narrative with a compelling depth, capturing the complexities of grief and the struggle to find meaning in the aftermath. With stunning clarity and grace, Blue Diagonals is a profound meditation on the intersections of life, death, and the possibility of renewal. A moving, unforgettable read.

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9781916938496

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Reviews

Haunting, melancholic, and charged with the glamour of yacht parties and Monégasque summers, Blue Diagonals is a beguiling account of one author's many lives, lived in different places. It's a truly kaleidoscopic memoir, told with nostalgia, wit and poetic intensity. - Roisin Kilberd In these intriguing and intricate essays, Lucy Holme explores how to tell our lives back to ourselves as stories of wonder and pain and joy. - Emilie Pine Lyrical, wry and written with enormous tenderness, Blue Diagonals is a masterful fusion of experimental poetics and heartfelt storytelling. Opening on the neon cityscape of Miami dive bars and strip malls, this fantastic collection takes us on a journey from the US to the ice-cool marble mansions of Monaco and the slow beauty of Cork city. In essays intercut with poems and textual experiments, Lucy Holme presents us with an expansive space as we follow one young woman's emerging subjectivity against a backdrop of the luxury yachting world. Taking the tides as subject but also form, lives, friendships and love affairs ebb and flow across the pages. Inventive, heart-catching and beautifully made, Blue Diagonals is an unmissable read. - Mariah Whelan I found reading these essays akin to stepping onto a hotel balcony while on holiday, of being flooded with the blue sensations of sea and sky, with strange sounds and olfactory seductions. These are the moments when you become unmoored from everyday realities and receptive to the kind of truths that you cannot afterwards unhear. This is a stunning collection: sensual in its imagery, bursting with insight, full of sidelong glances down vistas of great depth; daring, moving, deeply affecting. - Cathy Sweeney Most of us are playing it safe. Lucy Holme isn't. Not in how she chose her path in life and not in how she writes about it, either. Blue Diagonals brings you into a world at once as glitzy and glamorous as it is seedy and nauseating. Amid great personal upheaval, Lucy Holme is our astute guide to a world that is brocaded and coddled, unlike the one she and her friends inhabit. A kaleidoscopic journey of personal development, Blue Diagonals forces us to confront unhappiness in its many guises, in order to 'navigate our way together out of the shadows cast by this chimerical existence'. - David Toms In a delicate sequence of linked vignettes, Lucy Holme sings a deep-felt ode to a formative search for self. From the soul-numbing mystery of mismatched intimacy, to the painful joy of personal wisdom hard-won, Blue Diagonals draws a glistening portrait of the necessary costs and unknowable rewards of starting again, and again. - Cristín Leach In Blue Diagonals, Lucy Holme casts her net wide but also deep. In layers of exquisite detail, she navigates us to multiple locations while fearlessly exploring grief, love, motherhood and missed connections. - Eimear Ryan

Author Information

Lucy Holme lives in Cork City. Her work features in PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, Banshee, and The Pig's Back amongst others. She was a runner-up in the Southword Literary Essay Competition and Brotherton Poetry Prize, and was the winner of the Cúirt New Writing Prize for Poetry 2024. Her debut chapbook, Temporary Stasis was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award. She is currently studying for a PhD in poetry at University College Cork where she also teaches memoir and poetry.

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