The Mending Worm

Poetry. How strange and hewn and scarified these poems are! In her drive to claim the singularity of her own singed (and searing) fables, Joan Houlihan has composed a brilliant ‘black startle-box’ of oddment and truths. THE MENDING WORM is a book of stunning accomplishment –Lucie Brock-Broido. Joan Houlihan’s images and figures are lapidary, her diction alert and startling, her lines chiseled, their sounds echoing back and forth, and yet for all the exquisite craft in these poems, there is something terrible and wild underneath their surfaces..THE MENDING WORM gives us poems that in their art and authenticity render whole that which has been shattered. Read them and you will see –Fred Marchant. Joan Houlihan is author of Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays. She is founding director of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, Massachusetts, where she also teaches.