Putting My Ash on the Line by Kathleen Holliday
$14.99
In this collection, Kathleen Holliday deftly blends humor and pathos to reveal poignant aspects of her life, her love of language, speculations about what hides beneath the surface, and more. The speaker’s emotional states are perfectly captured in vivid images (Like a thatched cottage/on a windswept isle/abandoned,/this edifice too, will settle,/sink slowly, thistle-deep/into loam ), shimmering lines (Or will I be handed back/the boarding pass of my heart ), clever metaphors (To me/he will always be/a slim volume/of poetry/in a fine Italian hand ), and visceral descriptions (When you left/it was all my fault,/that glass not merely empty/but hammered into dust, my sight/eclipsed to black ).
The reader is taken in from the first title poem, then willingly follows the poet down the myriad alleyways of this journey — glimpses of the speaker’s writing life, family life, a pre-digital life in an art library, the leaning out for love and ambivalences in romantic relationships, through her love of books (The Joy of Text ) to musings about mortality and what might remain after death. This chapbook offers the reader a variety of gifts wrapped in surprising packages.
–Elizabeth E Landrum, Ph.D., (Clinical psychologist, poet, author of “Shelf Life”
I enjoyed Kathleen Holliday’s chapbook, Putting My Ash On The Line. Often playful like her title, these well-crafted poems have a certain restraint and dry humor; she avoids melodrama. They can also have a bite to them, as when she compares a lover to a large fish: “a flash of white underbelly,/ a gleaming row of hooks embedded in your lips,/ all those bonds you’d managed to break free of.” In a poem where she is “daunted by what we humans keep doing to other humans,” she is cheered by an African violet that is “a tiny fist raised to the light.” Holliday’s deft imagery, her speaker’s resilience, and her “a certain going for the jocular/despite all indications to the contrary” make for a chapbook worth reading and keeping.
–Richard Widerkehr, author of In The Presence Of Absence
Description
Putting My Ash on the Line
by Kathleen Holliday
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-373-0
2020
Kathleen Holliday lives on an island in the Salish Sea in Washington State. Her writing has appeared in The Bellingham Review, The Blue Nib Literary Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, Common Ground Review, Poetry Super Highway, SHARK REEF, and The Write Launch. She is a graduate of Augsburg University, Minneapolis, and an erstwhile student of the Lyle’s Bar School of Poetry. Her first chapbook, Putting My Ash On The Line, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Some of her published work can be read at: www.kathleenholliday.com
Rita Hoffman (verified owner) –
I love this book! Kathleen Holliday takes the reader on a journey with joy and pathos, often in the same poem. We join her in most of life’s significant events of love and loss, told with elegance and humor. Her imagery is vivid, her words worth remembering. Her book is on my nightstand, to be read again and again, and on my gift-giving list to share with treasured friends.