Announcements

Forthcoming in April 2023: Numinous Stones

A Chapbook of Horror Pantoums about Grief, Queerness, Gender, and Feminism

From Elgin Award winning author Holly Lyn Walrath, a haunting collection of poetry about grief and the sacred that digs deep beyond a fairytale world into the grave. Told in the circular pantoum form, Numinous Stones is a poetic graveyard littered with horror — from sentient scarecrows to silent skeletons to scorched sacred spaces. As each line repeats, new meaning gleams like bones unearthed in a shattered realm of monsters, dark forests, and dusty ghosts.

I am delighted to announce that my chapbook of horror pantoums NUMINOUS STONES will be published by Aqueduct Press in 2023.

This book has been a long time coming. I wrote this book after my father passed away from Parkinson’s disease. As I say in my author’s note, “the book, which was initially written in response to death, held a clinging veil of darkness on its metaphorical skin. Death follows this book, informs it, and delivers it into the world.” Of course, it’s queer and feminist too.

This little book was first published in Italian by Kipple Officina Libraria and Alex Tonelli. It was selected as a semi-finalist for the ​2021 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. I dedicate this book to my father and the late Marco Raimondo, the original translator of the Italian poems. This will be its first publication in English, with ten new poems!

Stay tuned for pre-order information! Please enjoy this excerpt from the book:

Parkinson’s is a Kind of Armageddon

by Holly Lyn Walrath

I dreamed of my father last night
He was thin and frail in bed
As he was in the moments before death
And he was crying out

He was thin and frail in bed
In the dream world he could speak
And he was crying out
We were in so much pain

In the dream world he could speak
His body was thin and mottled and naked
We were so much pain
I could do nothing but hold his hand again

His body was thin and mottled and naked
As he was in the moments before death
I could do nothing but hold his hand again
I dreamt of my father last night

Parkinson’s is a kind of Armageddon
It riddles the brain with silence
Nothing can enter or leave unaided
And the father I knew is not there

It riddles the brain with silence
Words are painful
And the father I knew is not there
So I don’t know what to say

Words are painful
They form into stones in his mouth
So I don’t know what to say
How do you say I’m sorry to a ghost

They form into stones in his mouth
I could do nothing but hold his hand again
How do you say I’m sorry to a ghost
Parkinson’s is a kind of Armageddon

“Walrath poetically constructs tombstones (what is poetry if not construction?) imbued with a sacred, powerful, and majestic presence that both attracts and terrifies. They are sacred tombstones that serve the poet, and we will see this in the reading of her texts to celebrate, mourn, cry out, and, finally, accept her father’s death…. The collected poems constitute a journey, a slow path that we could also define as a slow coming to consciousness. A becoming aware of a pain to be understood and experienced to be, finally, accepted.”
— From the original Introduction by Alex Tonelli in Numinose Lapidi