“The voice in Though The Walls Are Lit is mesmerizing, unsettling, and profoundly honest.

Emily Holt has found what poetry at its best can be: a way of speaking—which is also a way of surviving.

With two homelands, she distills a language to confront the demons of memory, the mysteries of identity, the inheritance of a history of violence and losses (Know where you are Here No where/No place the dead won’t go). Reading the first part of the collection is like following someone through a waking dream edged by nightmare. […]

Though the Walls Are Lit explores geographies of the soul, evoking a tradition of hunger strikes, imprisonment, and pain borne by bodies, notably female:

[And I could sing but—

only this kind of body

can have water break from it]

This is not the work of a newcomer, but a smart and accomplished artist, unafraid of darkness. Holt’s extended elegy for her past, her family, and her people has almost the force of liturgy. This remarkable collection shines with Yeats’s ‘terrible beauty.’”

—Stan Sanvel Rubin

About the book:

In ancient Brehon Law, the aggrieved who was neither warrior, bard, nor chieftain could protest against wrongdoing and attain redress through troscad, or fasting, at the doorstep of the accused. Though the Walls Are Lit considers and dramatizes the Irish tradition of hunger striking—not to air grievances, but to imagine the page as a threshold where poet and stranger may meet in protest and supplication. Weaving together elements of Catholic ritual, laments, and musical riffing, the poet imagines the act of reading as a doorway to the past, and a means of living more fully with the losses of the present.

Nonfiction

“A Book for This,” Hold Open the Door: A Commemorative Anthology from the Ireland Chair of Poetry (University College Dublin Press, 2020).

“Restless Creature,” Hinterland, 2019

“Emily Holt’s Restless Creature weaves a love story with film criticism in a rich, beautifully told piece that spans continents and time.” —from the editors

“Hunger,” Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015)