Joan Houlihan
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Joan Houlihan (born 1951 in Newton, Massachusetts) is the author of two books: Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays (ISBN 0615123112) and The Mending Worm (ISBN 1930974590), winner of the 2005 Green Rose Award from New Issues Press. She has written a series of essays on contemporary American poetry called The Boston Comment, which drew a great deal of attention for their criticism of both traditional and avant garde poetry, occasioning responses from Fred Moramarco of Poetry International [1] and wide range of letters from the poetry community both favourable and critical [2]. Houlihan is a staff reviewer for the Contemporary Poetry Review is editor of the online poetry magazine Perihelion and poetry editor for Del Sol Press.
Her work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry International, Fulcrum, Pleiades, Passages North, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Arts, VOLT and the Boston Review [3] [4], and has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2005) and An Anthology of Irish-American Poetry, 18th Century to Present (University of Notre Dame, 2006).
The Mending Worm has been described by Lucie Brock-Broido as “a book of stunning accomplishment" [5] and by Frederick Marchant as one that "gives us poems that in their art and authenticity render whole that which has been shattered." [6]. Ellen Wehle, poetry editor of AGNI magazine and poetry reviewer, states: "Writers are told 'make it fresh, make it new.' In The Mending Worm it's all new. Houlihan wields language like a weapon, carving out lines that are stingingly precise.” [7] (West Branch, Spring/Summer, 2006). In a more ambivalent review, Simon DeDeo, editor of rhubarb is susan, describes Houlihan's work as "setting concepts to music and, crucially, not allowing those concepts to alter, complexify, distort, within the poem itself." [8]
Houlihan is founder of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, Massachusetts and of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference in Colrain, Massachusetts.
