Lindsey Holland: Featured Poet

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Lindsey Holland grew up in Aughton, on the Lancashire border with Merseyside. She studied at the University of Warwick, gaining an MA in Writing, a daughter and a sideline in photography, before moving back to her hometown. She teaches poetry on the Creative Writing programme at Edge Hill University, where she is also working towards a Creative Writing PhD.

Her poetry and reviews have been published, or are forthcoming, in various magazines and anthologies including Tears in the Fence, The New Writer, B O D Y, Ink Sweat & Tears, Sabotage Reviews, Penning Perfumes, and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam.

She is currently co-editing the anthology Sculpted: Poetry of the North West, and she is the leader and founder member of North West Poets.

Her debut collection, Particle Soup, is available from The Knives Forks and Spoons Press. She tweets at @LindseyHolland

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From: ‘In Biopoesis’

vii

I go to the countryside city
and walk through sandstone streets.

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A woman in a blue dress chews her lip
and shop glass catches her

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in hard liquid. She folds her arms across
her ribs, and I wonder if she knows

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the kind of love that touches without asking.
I turn to see her pass the bus stop

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where a network advert – young woman, bright mouth –
connects you everywhere. There are scratches

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in the plastic, scuffs, indelible initials,
hearts. Hands have moved across here

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and in a room above I note the curtain’s V,
a face pale in between. He sees me and slips

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away to someone or something, a table
perhaps, a mug washed and rewashed,

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a blonde head, laughter lines, I don’t know.
If I were him I’d do the same.

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Some years ago they planted trees and now
parakeets have come like chameleons.

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I pull my hair into a new brown band and run.
I run. And this is everything.

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The London launch of Particle Soup will feature readings by Claire Trévien, Daniel Sluman and Lindsey Holland. It’s happening on Wednesday 17th October, 7.30pm, at the Betsey Trotwood. Entrance is free.

The Betsey Trotwood 56 Farringdon Rd, Clerkenwell, London, EC1R 3BL Tel: 020 7253 4285

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This is a highly recommended volume by a strong new writer.

– David Morley

In this intelligently designed collection Holland plucks patterns from random debris, mapping meaning out of scattered experiences of eros, of the polis.  Hers is a delightful poetic science, locating vibrant creatures among the ruins.  Particle is a discovery in more ways than one – in the smart  poems themselves, and in the way it brings us to the recognition that Holland is among the best young poets now writing in the UK.

– Todd Swift

Lindsey Holland writes hauntingly beautiful poems of love and fear and the non-existent space in between. To read her is to be startled by sudden eye-contact from a passerby – a glance that contains a whole alternative reality. Her imagery and rhythms engage and delight and her form thrills in both its mastery and innovation. You feel like you’ve returned from a long journey to find your home transfigured in an eternal twilight – a sense of loss, but of essential gain.

– Luke Kennard

Lindsey Holland’s assured debut invites the reader on a mythic and mysterious journey in which past and present are explored. Reading this collection is a compelling adventure: discoveries are made and epiphanies relished. The poems are lush and tactile, inventive yet rooted, spare but with all the right detail.

– Angela Topping

North West Poets: https://www.facebook.com/groups/281080788591125/

Particle Soup: http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/particlesoup.html

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LindseyHolland

The Betsey Trotwood: http://www.thebetsey.com/