Holoholo - (Pitt Poetry) by Barbara Hamby (Paperback)

About the Book

A Collection of Odes that Investigate What It Means to be Human and a Woman in World of Breathtaking Beauty and Terror

Book Synopsis

Holoholo is the Hawaiian word for walking out with no destination in mind. In the three sections of this book, Barbara Hamby walks out into the current American chaos with its inferno of wars, street violence, apocalyptic fantasies, and racial tension. Fueled by an American lingo that embraces slang, Yiddish, street talk, and the yearning to be able to describe her moment in time, these poems encompass the complicated past, difficult present, and unknown future. Every foray offers a glimpse of the world constructed from one woman's collage of consciousness.

Ode on My Nightingale

My nightingale is the conquistador of moonlight,
the engine of divine hullabaloo, the dance party
of shining headlights on a dark road past midnight,
the thrill of that first kiss in the battered Chevette,
the wrong turn that made me burn my map, clap twice,
summon my djinn. My nightingale is the stake
in my heart that can't be dislodged, the hodge-podge
of my brain at two a.m. when the drunks
have gone home or passed out in the street. My nightingale
trills in the darkness, thinks of nothing
but his song, says forget me at your peril for I am
the tiara of rain that falls from the purple sky,
the lies you tell yourself to wake up from your dreams,
so listen, for my song will fade into nothing,
but nothing is made without me. I am the cosmologist
of the atomic, high priest of everything
you never wanted to be, all your highjacked dreams,
the screams in the muddle of night, the beam
of starlight on the river of sleep, for we are alone,
my darling, on this planet of night, and I am
your little god, your drinking water straight from the stream,
for my song is spooling into the night forever
and ever, amen. I am the derivative of sin. O let me in.

Review Quotes

Past Praise for Barbara Hamby:
"[Hamby] has cultivated a polyglot idiom all her own, of anecdotes, erudition, and American pop culture. She combines a deadly serious love for the power of language with irreverence; she leaps across historical periods and yokes unlikely referents."-- "Women's Review of Books"

Barbara Hamby's poems are wild, outspoken, seriously funny, motor-mouth rambles that take us through hoops of association to places both unexpected and unimpeachable. This collection offers a generous helping of poems so crackling with references and busy with verbal energy you might feel them buzzing in your hands.--Past Praise from Billy Collins

Hamby's poems are good-natured, gossipy, and fun . . . She attempts to render in verse the near chaos of perception that typifies human consciousness as it careens through a lifetime's worth of unruly accident.--Past Praise "Yale Review"

Part romp, part wisdom, there is more than enough in here to spark sadness, joy, regret, side-eye, and laughter in any reader.-- "Adroit Journal"

About the Author

Burn is Barbara Hamby's eighth book of poems. Most recently she has published Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018), and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014). In 2010 her book of stories about Hawai'i, Lester Higata's 20th Century, won the Iowa/John Simmons Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar. Hamby lives in Tallahassee, Florida.