Holly Iglesias

Holly Iglesias is the author of three collections of poetry— Sleeping Things; Angles of Approach; and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World—as well as a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry. Her most recent publication is a collaborative chapbook, Myth America (Anhinga Press), co-written with Maureen Seaton, Carolina Hospital and Nicole Hospital-Medina.  Holly has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami, with a focus on archival and documentary poetry. Her current project is an intergenerational memoir in prose fragments with the working title Theories of Flight.

If you are a writer in want of dynamite material, it really helps if you grew up in a white bread Midwestern suburb and were taught by nuns (“Each night I pray one Hail Mary for good grades, one for a vocation, and one for miniature golf”), and as a young adult found yourself embedded in a refugee community, trapped in the middle of the culture wars. The threat of obliteration is a theme here, whether by air-raid or terrorist bomb or the conditions of exile. We may be, as the author claims, “a mere speck in the cosmos,” but in her hands, even a mere speck contains multitudes. Holly Iglesias’ Sleeping Things is a crowning achievement from one of our most wry, incisive poets—¡Perfecto!

—Madeleine Blais, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To the New Owners: a Martha's Vineyard Memoir

Sleeping Things is luminous, marvelously succinct, and always engaging. Iglesias renders the spectacle of growing up not with reflexive, all-too-easy nostalgia but with clear-eyed affection, meticulous precision and gusto, giving day-to-day incidents and reclaimed details of that hopeful, rambunctious Cold War era a sense of delightful enterprise and luster. This new book is a refreshingly artful, savvy meditation on the past, rife with compassion and humor, one to celebrate, savor, and enjoy!

— Cyrus Cassells, author of The Crossed-out Swastika

With stubborn joy, Iglesias refuses to let sleeping things lie, and we as readers are reawakened to why such human reclamation is so absolutely consequential. Whether turning her attention to Catholic grade school Cold War days where “students pray to pure space, that place where the future blooms,” the Cuban community in Miami conjuring an island that seems almost imaginary, or the glimpse of a younger self sipping coffee in Spain “dressed as the girl in Dylan’s song who never stumbles, who’s got no place to fall,” Iglesias unfailingly finds the pitch-perfect, sonic delight that only poetry can provide.

—David Clewell, author of Taken Somehow by Surprise