Overview

Maeve Holler's debut collection, HOW TO LEAVE YOUR FAMILY, inspects the idea of family, the creation and destruction of it, and what being part of one really means. The book poetically and speculatively retraces the life story of Holler's late grandmother-who grows up in Mississippi, escapes an abusive relationship, and flees to Georgia, only to leave her two children behind-and the mass of folklore that has always surrounded her. Holler's poems follow the aftermath of this story and pick up the pieces her grandmother left behind, and together, ultimately taking the shape of a multigenerational, coming-of-self narrative of witness.

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Reviews

"The resounding paradox in Maeve Holler's first book of beautifully crafted poems is this: You love your family; you don't leave them. In a rogue's gallery of family portraits, Holler leads us into a world all her own, one unlike any we have seen before. This is a stunning debut.-Peter Cooley, Louisiana Poet Laureate 2015-2017, author of The One Certain Thing, World Without Finishing, Night Bus to the Afterlife, and others While reading HOW TO LEAVE YOUR FAMILY, one begins to imagine how a reader of the early collections of C.D. Wright and Maurice Manning must have felt. Dazzled, surely, but also bowled over by the power of a freshly minted voice, by the courage of its singular vision. This debut by Maeve Holler is a fever dream with its own overheated logic-stormy, excessive, Gothic, raucous, revelatory. The poet has created a multigenerational saga with its own vocabulary for a family wrecked, reconstituted, redeemed, and, in the end, tenderized by the young woman who watched and listened and lived to tell the tale.-Holly Iglesias, author of Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World ""I try to fight sound with tangibility,"" the poet Maeve Holler writes, ""but studying the tactile can only help so much."" How wondrous, then, that in these blessed pages, a century's worth of a family's history is recounted in celestial color, sublime imagery, and language that shimmers even as it scars-rendered with exquisite tenderness. HOW TO LEAVE YOUR FAMILY teaches us ""the alphabet of silence;"" what confounds-what astounds, then-is how loudly its echoes resound.-Jubi Arriola-Headley, author of original kink"

Author Information

Maeve Holler is a writer, editor, poet, and educator. Her work has been published by Tolsun Books, The Boiler Journal, Leveler, Scalawag Magazine, The Cardiff Review, Wildness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2020 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize and was most recently nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize. Maeve holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami and a BA in English & Gender and Sexuality Studies from Tulane University. She currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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