How To Leave Your Family by Maeve Holler

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