Lions Like Us — Pre-Order
Forthcoming from Red Light Lit Press (May 2024)
At the heart of Hollie Hardy’s Lions Like Us is the question: What would you sacrifice for love? Here are poems of longing and loss that weigh and confront the risk of change. The story starts with a budding passion before the burgeoning pandemic and bears immersive witness to distance, isolation, Black Lives Matter protests, and a new love unfolding and refolding at the center of a city in turmoil. Against a burning backdrop, image-rich and lyrical, full of teeth and hands, doorways and birds, nightscapes of ocean and fire, these poems chart the journey of a phoenix, “a woman turning in/ to herself.”
Sample Poems
Grace Cathedral’s 2023: The Year of Poetry Anthology:
“A Field of Bees”
The Passionfruit Review:
“Five More Minutes Please” and “Long Distance”
Dispatches from Quarantine #37:
“A Murmuration of Starlings” and “Slow Motion Upon a Pallid Landscape”
Product Details
Publisher : Red Light Lit Press (Available May, 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 108 pages
ISBN-13 : 978-0-9998895-2-7
Dimensions : 6 x 9 inches
Advance Praise for Lions Like Us
In Lions Like Us, as the poet herself writes, “every poem is a love poem” — to others, and to the world itself. Reading this book is like falling in love, then parting, then returning to the beloved, again and again and again. Reader, enter to weep, to laugh, to find solidarity. Enter to find, in its purest, most intense, most direct and available form, poetry.
~Matthew Zapruder, author of Story of a Poem and Father's Day
"With sparkling, spell-like language, Lions Like Us guides us through love-haunted spaces where desire is alive in the wake of sorrow and loss. These poems are tidal and tender; they feel into tectonic cultural shifts while remaining close to the “emblems of dailiness” that make life meaningful: a mint slipped in a mouth, sweat down the spine, one body leaning into the salt of another. I’m in awe of the quivering architecture of these poems, where nights are “dressed in glass” and the “soft / hammer of love” pulses through the dream’s roar. Hardy is a poet of surprise and precision with an oceanic heart.
~Brynn Saito, author of Under a Future Sky and Power Made Us Swoon
"There are those stories from childhood about brooding and powerful women who live in difficult to get to places: Hollie Hardy's poetry is what happens to those stories when they grow up and become poems. If I quoted all of my favorite lines and references we'd be here all day. These poems, as Hardy herself, are a bouquet of the unexpected, a defibrillator for whatever organ it is that lets you reel in wonder.
~Kim Shuck, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita
"Hollie Hardy’s poetry is an intersection of multiple dimensions of wisdom both spirit and metallic, personal and populist, song and rattle. In these lines of brilliant observation, you find an impossible absence of the monarchies of time and place usually necessary for assertion. And the ghosts looking over your shoulder will also be sent to the memories of our deepest loves and losses. A manuscript of ether come down; enjoy the spell.
~Tongo Eisen-Martin, Poet Laureate of San Francisco
"How do we balance love with loss? How do we balance private joy with public pain? In jagged, always unexpected verses, in which the nightscape “is a skillet of coffee shops” and “no one can be saved/ not even at a discount” we meet Hollie Hardy’s old muse, desire, and watch her light her lantern on these thorny, insoluble, but ultimately fascinating questions. Lit by her light, we “learn to be brave/ to risk and reveal our most fragile parts” and “let our hearts take the long way home,"" — returning the better for it. This is a book to savor.
~Tess Taylor, author of Leaning Toward Light and Rift Zone"
"Defiant yet vulnerable, sensual yet brutal, the poems in Hollie Hardy’s Lions Like Us make you feel. The book explores loss and miscommunication; it celebrates promise and possibilities; it looks to community while illuminating the personal and intimate. These poems roar and sing.
~Tomas Moniz, author of All Friends Are Necessary
"Hollie Hardy’s second full-length collection, Lions Like Us, pulses the reader through the pangs of love in mergence and severance, in delicate attempting and ravening tenacity, in “uncertainty’s moldering refrain” and “ships unfolding the sea” that “salvag[e] light from the water’s edge.” Hardy conveys a tender ferocity that invites the reader to encompass self, other, nature, city, strength, vulnerability, and injustice for what they are, and in so doing to stand, act, and roar from the sovereignty of the heart’s courage.
~Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House
The exuberant poems in Hollie Hardy’s Lions Like Us embrace spiders, starlings, and wasps in a cityscape that bustles with lost love and police helicopters alike. She uses the languages of science, philosophy, and advertising to build a universe that holds hope and danger, fantasy and feral ferocity.
~Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Flare, Corona and Field Guide to the End of the World.
Intimate and vulnerable, lyrical and lush, Hollie Hardy’s second collection of poems offers gorgeous consolation in our time of crisis. Amidst streets that are “quarantine-empty,” Lions Like Us invents “a new vocabulary for togetherness,” conjuring love as a haven in a broken world. “Every poem is a love poem,” she writes, “The weight of your body next to mine/ means you are still here, means I am not alone.”
~Deborah Landau, author of Skeletons and Soft Targets