Bücher von Holly Day

The riverfront always drew people to Stillwater. The Ojibwe and Dakota first settled here, later striking a treaty with Europeans, who quickly realized the St. Croix River s potential as an ideal way to move lumber. One of the first to float logs down the river was Captain Stephen Hanks, cousin to Abraham Lincoln. The lumber business gave birth to Minnesota s first millionaire as the city grew, and Stillwater received one of the state s first Carnegie grants for a free public library. Meanwhile, the state prison saw notorious gangster Cole Younger found the Prison Mirror in 1887, now the nation s oldest continuously operated offender newspaper. Authors Holly Day and Sherman Wick celebrate the history and charm of one of Minnesota s finest cities, from the frontier to today."

This is a collection of poetry about change, and the passage of time and how no matter how hard you try, there is just no way to stop it. For me, writing has been a way to try to briefly stop time, to capture as much of what's going on around me and what's happening to me as possible. While I've never been much for photography, I have always been one for writing, and this collection is a book of snapshots of things I don't want to forget.

In Into the Cracks, Holly Day gives us 53 precisely crafted fragments of a carefully observed and passionate life. It's the life of a mother, a daughter, a lover, a housewife, a victim, a rebel--told in terms of concrete boots and dying butterflies, clouds of squid ink and the smudged glass of a dusty picture frame.In "Bloodlines," for example, the human impulses to procreate and to protect offspring expand to include a maple tree which "sends its helocopter seeds across the yard/ in desperation dreams of propagation." Does the tree hate the narrator/gardener who clips those seeds--or does it resign itself to sterility? Will it retaliate, tossing branches at the narrator's children during some future storm? The questions behind such questions are rich, the metaphors inventive, sometimes alarming, often humorous.In "Three Screwdriver Hello," we're warned that "I get like a razor when you say/ [you] 'understand,' mock the lonely inside me." In "Bleeding the Brakes Dry," the memory of hearing waves crash on a distant shore can become almost loud enough ("if I try hard enough") to drown out the angry mutterings of a husband out in the garage working on a car that's never going to make it back to that beach.In other poems, we learn to read cracks in pavements and in paintings, cracks made by fingernails running ragged across human skin, cracks in the facade of sanity or sobriety. As the author writes:"I have always found comfort in clutter and chaos, especially when it comes to the natural world and its constant battle with the order imposed by civilization. I delight in seeing spiders run out from underneath the sofa of a perfectly cleaned house, or watching ivy crack its way into a building's facade. For me, the pretense of order, in whatever form it takes, acts as a shield against the unpredictability and lurking chaos of the outside world. In Into the Cracks I aim to dissolve the lines between the unwritten rules which have formed our artificial environments and the reality of a chaotic universe."The cover image for Into the Cracks is a photograph of one of the author's unconventional yet emotionally intense portraits--this one done by patiently, carefully, even meditatively, using a very sharp needle to push and pull colorful threads through the interstices between warp and weft of a quite conventional piece of canvas. Holly Day captures chaos in tiny spaces and holds it there for us to see. And hear. And taste and touch and smell.