“Tensile and luminous as a glass-winged butterfly, Glimmerglass Girl chronicles the passions of a woman’s heart and its multifarious musings with a marvelous mix of toughness and tenderness. In a shimmering world at once ‘honey-brimmed and buzzing,’ where ‘blueberry coffee’ and a ‘kissing prayer,’ or a ‘quiet mess of a body of light’ offer diurnal delights, this wildly chimerical gathering of hybridized fairy tales and fabulous meditations on womanhood might carry Emily Dickinson’s admonition of epistolary intimacy, ‘open me carefully.’ Indeed, readers should open Walrath’s slender volume carefully, hold these rare poems up to the sun, then lean in quietly to hear each one sing in flight.”
–Karen An-hwei Lee, author of Phylo of Joy, Ardor, and In Medias Res.
“An exciting collection, of both words and images, superimposed together, creating an interesting visual form that breathes life into the mundane parts of being alive. Walrath creates her Glimmerglass Girl as a sort of everywoman, a person that continues to thrive, even in the face of daily patriarchal violence. As an unexpected narrative arc emerges, Glimmerglass Girl says, ‘I am dis-embodying my body / or what I once called skin,’ allowing these poems to rupture any preconceived expectations readers may have and be reassembled into the beautifully unexpected.”
–Caseyrenée Lopez, author of the new gods and i was born dead
“Glimmerglass Girl is an ethereal collection of emotional gut-punches—Walrath delves into the hidden depths of womanhood with poems at once violent and delicately beautiful.”
–Cassandra Rose Clarke, author of Star’s End, Our Lady of the Ice, and The Mad Scientist’s Daughter
“Glimmerglass Girl delights and chills the senses in equal measure, deceptively minute in its scope. Walrath challenges preconceived notions of feminine identity in these delicate, uncanny poems—and spares nobody, no body, in the process.”
–A.J. Odasso, Senior Poetry Editor, Strange Horizons
“Washing the dishes, peeling an onion, wearing a bra, all these details of life become immersed in magic in Holly Lyn Walrath’s gorgeous poems. In Glimmerglass Girl, the questions of how to be a woman and how to reconcile the different sides of our bodies and selves is brought into startling focus. Walrath’s writing takes your breath away and then sucker punches you, but I mean this in the best possible way—these poems devastate, destruct, and then bring you back to life.”
–Chloe N. Clark, author of The Science of Unvanishing Objects
Patricia Flaherty Pagan –
Holly Walrath’s lyrical yet startling language explores the layered experiences of women. Sisters, daughters, wives and mothers become “both fire firebrand and ice cleft in sunlight.” She weaves emotions into precise, vivid images. In “The Art of Loneliness,” she compares fostering an appreciation for being alone to the way in which one “might care for an orchid.” The flowing, ephemeral effects of poems like “Elegy for a Body,” compliment the raw power of “Premise of the Heart” and the emotional accessibility of nods to modern womanhood such as “Self Portrait through an iPhone.” Memorable, the female journey of refuge and despair in “She Learns How to Disappear” speaks with an honesty that haunts the reader. This pretty volume from Finishing Line Press pairs Walrath’s poems with clever and moving illustrations.
Chloe (verified owner) –
A gorgeous collection of deeply moving poems exploring what it means to be a woman.
Tony Burnett –
I received an advance copy of this new chapbook by Holly Lyn Walrath. It contains lyrical poetry that’s both haunting and beautiful. If it doesn’t touch your soul you should check yourself for a pulse. It’s available for preorder from Finishing Line Press. Do that self a favor and order it today.
Tyler Robert Sheldon –
Dark and contemplative poems! This little book grapples with questions of identity and conforming to/defying prescribed social roles, integrating vintage artwork and a steady through-line of effortful self-examination all the while. I highly recommend this tight collection, Holly Lyn Walrath’s new chapbook.
Karen Bovenmyer (verified owner) –
Glimmerglass Girl elegantly captures a female journey eerily familiar, a reflection of me, or a lost relative to whom I have only now been introduced. Walrath’s lush verse winds around perceptions, challenging them, guiding them back, like a skilled hand guides a toddler. Just as I start to learn to roll over, to sit up, to stand—her layered, linked verse invents new ways for me to understand
the world I have lived in so long.
Nathan Elias –
This collection questions the nature of womanhood, the nature of the heart, and the nature of existing within the shell of a body. Walrath writes, “I am dis-embodying my body / or what I once called skin, / its remnants rounding out, / the insides of a funeral urn / whose curves make sense.” Glimmerglass Girl sets out to dis-embody our very conception of bodies altogether, and in doing so instills a yearning for what it means to live and love without ever turning an eye from the inevitability of death. These poems exist in the space between memory and longing, between blue Cadillacs during Texas summers and cotton scrapbook bird nests during raw winters. In Walrath’s contemplation of beauty and loneliness she manages to obscure how we see ourselves using a lens of poetic fantasy while simultaneously crystallizing what it means to be human.