Every Atom

by Erin Coughlin Hollowell

Overview

Across distance, the speaker of these poems wrestles with the way her mother’s loss of memory changes the narrative between them. By interrogating the past, fissures in language, and the vagaries of identity, the speaker comes to a recognition that we are all more alike in our humanity than we are different.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597099066
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/02/2018
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Erin Coughlin Hollowell is a poet and writer who lives at the end of the road in Alaska. Prior to landing in Alaska, she lived on both coasts, in big cities and small towns, pursuing many different professions from tapestry weaving to arts administration. In 2013, Boreal Books published her first collection Pause, Traveler. She has been awarded a Rasmuson Foundation Fellowship, a Connie Boochever Award, and an Alaska Literary Award. Her work has been most recently published in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sugar House Review, and was a finalist for the 49th Parallel Contest for the Bellingham Review.

Table of Contents

i

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses 15

Up there toward the winter sky 16

The last scud of day 18

A uniform hieroglyphic 20

What have I to do with lamentation? 21

Night of the few, large stars 23

The palpable in its place and the impalpable in its place 25

With linguists and contenders 26

Waits by the hole in the frozen surface 28

ii

Who learns under it to destroy the teacher 33

Life wherever moving 35

For the fourth-month moon showers have, and the mica on the side of the rock has 37

Continue your annotations, continue your questionings 38

A furlong without sympathy 39

Not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol 41

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now 42

If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle, they are nothing 44

Love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine 45

Those wing'd purposes 46

Entering the suburbs of some vast and ruin'd city 47

iii

Not asking the sky to come down to my good will, scattering it freely forever 51

Perpetural payment 52

Heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed 53

This is the meal equally set 54

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves 55

Tender and growing night 56

Ascend from the moon 57

In vessels that sail, my works sail 58

Backward as well as forward sluing 59

There are millions of suns left 61

The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time 63

iv

Cycles have ferried my cradle 67

Seasons pursuing each other 69

I also say it is good to fall 70

Depressions and exaltations 71

Hankering, gross, mystical, nude 73

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach 74

Journey work of the stars 76

Soft doctrine 78

A grammar of the old cartouches 79

And then farther and farther 81

Silent and mournful shining 83

Every atom 84

Editorial Reviews

Despite its distressing subject, Every Atom is a stirring book. Hollowell's masterful writing and her profound reflections on her mother's final year hold us and carry us through this grave but illuminating collection.”—John Morgan for Cirque Magazine

From the Publisher