doug holder
Category: poetry books| January 31st, 2007
No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain
poems by Doug Holder
sunnyoutside press | 28 pages. | ISBN 978-1-934513-00-2 | Featuring original cover art by Ed Herrera | 5″ x 8″, saddle-stitched, recycled fiber papers | First edition of 150 - 10 EURO | Release date: April 26, 2007
“No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain is…engaging and accessible. The topics are self reflection and relationships, especially those that end. He still exercises that eye for the absurd amid the mundane…. Doug Holder [is] a poet of the people, not absorbed in navel gazing language games but reaching out and shaking readers awake.” —Main Street Rag
“Holder’s work here is rich with textual imagery. A stranger’s laugh becomes an ‘astringent mixture of the hilarious and sinister.’ Rain is a ’spectral tapping on the roof.’ These are words of a master poet who sees the world clearly and shares that vision generously with readers.” —Midwest Book Review Bookwatch
“These books are printed and produced in the finest tradition of the small press: well laid-out and speaking to the mind rather than mass market. Centers of artistic energy seem to move around the country periodically, and it’s good to see rare meat on the finest tables again.” —Small Press Review
“Amazingly effective, what we have here are classic, condensed meditations on what it’s all about in a context of eventual anihilation. A volume to be on the shelves next to Keats, Whitman, Rimbaud.” —Hugh Fox
“This book is a gift, the silhouette of restlessness as Holder studies the way things end and sees that there is no real ending. He celebrates ‘a standing chant, a prayer for the common man.’ Holder understands compassion as generosity in tender poems carved from the quickened wood of the moment.” —Afaa Michael Weaver, Simmons College
“The images and angles of thought and language are at once familiar and plain and odd. They are flashes of insight and snapshots of time and place and humanity.” —Dan Sklar, Endicott College
“With confidence and occasional flashes of humor, these are poems (lamentations/meditations) on what was, is, and ultimately will be. They are strong and unapologetic in both their rage and acceptance, offering up a clear view of the truth—that no one gets out of here alive.” —Gloria Mindock, ?ervená Barva Press
Doug Holder. Imagine that poet, with notebook or scrap of paper capturing instantaneous instances like rare insects in the midst of a yacking socializing crowd in Harvard Square, Cambridge, writing a book of poems and you have (if your write to him) in hand Dreams at the Au Bon Pain. It is poetry netting crisp snapshots of memory between sips of strong coffee and sweet deserts and spontaneous perch watching as humanity and his drifts in and out of a crowd in and around an outside sidewalk coffee cafe. His dreams are tender and widening, reverberating circles on dark pools of felt but undefined deep emotion. All a poet, he runs Ibbetson Street Press, and edits Ibbetson Street Magazine. Write him. Send work. He is among the vertebra that holds the Boston and eastern Mass. poetry community up to snuff. Michael Basinski
Doug Holder was born in Manhattan, N.Y. on July 5, 1955. A small press activist, he founded the Ibbetson Street Press in the winter of 1998 in Somerville, Mass. He has published over 40 books of poetry of local and national poets and over 20 issues of the literary journal Ibbetson Street. Doug Holder is the arts/editor for The Somerville News, a co-founder of “The Somerville News Writers Festival,” “Newton Free Library Poetry Series” and is the curator of the in Newton, Mass. His interviews with contemporary poets are archived at the Harvard and Buffalo University libraries, as well as Poet’s House in NYC. Doug Holder’s own articles and poetry have appeared in several anthologies including: Inside the Outside: An Anthology of Avant-Garde American Poets (Presa Press) Greatest Hits: twelve years of Compost Magazine (Zephyr Press) and America’s Favorite Poems edited by Robert Pinsky. His work has also appeared in such magazines as: Rattle, Doubletake, Hazmat, The Boston Globe Magazine, Caesura, Sahara, Linden Lane, Poesy, Small Press Review, Artword Quarterly, Manifold (U.K.), The Café Review, the new renaissance and many others. His two most recent poetry collections are: “Of All The Meals I Had Before…” ( Cervena Barva- 2007)) and “No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain” ( sunyoutside-2007). His collection “THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MIDTOWN TUNNEL” went out in 2008. ( Cervena Barva Press) Doug Holder holds an M.A. in Literature from Harvard University.
Much more on Doug Holder can be found here…
10 EURO incl. shipment cost world-wide plus a special Doug Holder poetry postcard.
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