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Pre-order Price Guarantee until December 18, 2026.This title will be released on February 12, 2027.The Whale Gaze is the fourth chapbook by this award-winning poet. As in previous works, Holliday demonstrates a love of language; irony and wit; succinct and deft imagery. These poems lean into the writer’s relationship to island and sea. The title poem emphasizes wonder and mystery: “a shadow spreads under the boat/a pooling indigo.” In Rogue Whales, the poet imagines the thuggish personae of orcas, killers who, “ram & sink those boats./ Rattle some cages.”The haiku exemplify how much can be said in few words: “once there were trees here/still at night a soughing sound/susurrus of souls.” These are poems that should be read aloud for full effect. The final poem, “Waving, not Drowning,” was a semi-finalist in The MacGuffin/Poet Hunt 29 Contest 2024. The Whale Gaze is another venture by a poet well worth reading. #poetry #memory #whales #haiku #salishsea
Kathleen Holliday lives on an island in the Salish Sea. Her writing has appeared in several literary journals including Cathexis Northwest Press, CIRQUE Journal, Common Ground Review,Poetry Super Highway, SHARK REEF, and The Write Launch. She is a graduate of Augsburg University, Minneapolis, MN. Her chapbooks, Putting My Ash on the Line (2020), Boatman, Pass By (2023) and A Cage in Search of a Bird (2025) were published by Finishing Line Press.
PRAISE:
With poignancy, wit and humor, Kathleen Holliday’s fourth chapbook of poems takes us on a pilgrimage to the sea where we meet an assortment of whales, these massive cetaceans which, like humans, are mammals.As always with her work, each poem is beautifully crafted with just the right words and with humor, sometimes when we least expect it, as in Rogue Whales. Her imagery and insights are stellar, as in the title poem, The Whale Gaze, with its startling and vivid metaphors: “a rolling mountainside;” a “heart as big as a car.” Or “sails taut as pterodactyl wings; brigantines built of hearts of oak.”There’s playfulness, too, but under the playfulness lies a deeper truth about how we’ve failed these colossal beings and sorrow at how we’ve treated mother earth and all its creatures (not just us). There’s a profoundly solemn apology, too, in “Forgive Us.” This is a writer in love with words, and I encourage readers to recite the poems aloud to savor the delicious sound of them These poems are alive. Dive into The Whale Gaze and see for yourself.–LORNA REESE is a founder and editor emerita of SHARK REEF Literary Magazine, one of the first online literary journals.Like the sea, Kathleen Holliday’s chapbook, The Whale Gaze, shimmers with shifting depths and registers. Classical references—Persephone, Icarus—swim past simple figures of the natural world: a fox, a fallen tree. Wordplay waves and rollicks: “…galleons golden in the sun/feluccas, sails taut as pterodactyl wings,/brigantines built of hearts of oak…” (“Flotilla”) The dark depth of poignancy in “Forgive Us”— “…stiffened corsets, made buttons/from your bone,/and orphans of your children”—gives way to sparkling humor in “Haiku #4”: “a whale rider, me?/surely, I’d have fallen off/dolphins would snicker”. Through the entire collection, Holliday celebrates a lifelong love affair with words: “In the flaming foliage of words,/brilliant colors and undergrowth,/the hedges and briers,/the gorse, the furze of it,/the scratch and tear of it,/the brief flowering amid thorns…” (“Foliage”) This ocean of words and images is where Holliday plays and dives deep. Take a good breath and wade in.–GRETCHEN KLOPFER WING, author of The Flying Burgowski Trilogy
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