27 Threats to Everyday Life by Anne Holub

Anne Holub’s extra-ordinary poems mark wayposts on a life examined with verve and smarts. They name fears we fear to name. They unfold questions. They do not flinch. Changing landscapes, memory, bees, the body’s gifts and vulnerabilities: they’re all here, and with them, the sweet surprises of the poet’s art—of well-chosen words, well shaped.

–Jeanne Larsen, author of What Penelope Chooses: poems

As is often the case with our most primal words, “threat” is an old one, and understandably so, with its denotation of impending danger, menace, or coercion — forces environmental, societal, and somatic that have accompanied human life since its beginnings. Anne Holub’s 27 Threats to Everyday Life offers a litany of such potential vexations, ranging from the personal and quotidian (dental plaque and insomnia, for example, or an air-conditioner “held high above with nothing / more than optimism /and a brick”) to the globally dire (mudslides, wildfires, floods, the corona virus). Sonically attuned to the inextricable links between humans and the world they inhabit, these poems are a bellwether, timeless and timely, offering, with a convincing dose of hope, both “a warning [and] a watch” for our imperiled moment.   

–Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems 

In a hazardous world, and across wild landscapes at once beautiful and threatening, Anne Holub‘s poems keep vigil. Even as they interrogate our notions of safety and wholeness, they find small mercies, too. This is a remarkable collection about the ways we survive, despite everything. 

–Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life