Hi friends. Thanks so much for subscribing to my newsletter. In each issue I'll share my latest poetry news, along with a few general thoughts about poetry. So let’s kick things off!

My News

This first newsletter will be a kind of “year in review” to get you caught up and also because it was a pretty eventful year.

As most of you probably know, my first book came out last summer. I remain grateful to the good folks at ELJ Editions for selecting my manuscript and producing such a beautiful book.

I still love the cover, don’t you? The image is by the late Andy Sweet, who photographed Miami Beach in the late 1970s and early 1980s — my old stomping ground. If you aren’t familiar with his life and work, I highly recommend the documentary The Last Resort. Fascinating!

One of the greatest thrills for me during this book-publishing process was to receive back-of-book blurbs from the esteemed poets Ellen Bass, Denise Duhamel, and David Trinidad, three of my all-time favorites. You can read their blurbs here.

And I’m so grateful for the lovely reviews that have come out this year, including:

• In The Adroit Journal, Sofia Fall writes that Mangrove’s poems "are genuinely, continuously surprising, in their use of humor as a foil to nostalgia, their embrace of absurdity over sentimentality, and their insistence on revisiting moments that do not seem to mean very much, until Hollands, capably and gorgeously, shows you that they do." Read the full review.

• In The Shore, Tyler Truman Julian writes, “Mangrove is at times fun, at times emotionally challenging. Hollands’ collection reminds the reader of both the nuance and universality of the human experience. Reading Mangrove is like striking up a conversation with a stranger after one too many beers—all friendship, emotion, and immediate connection. When the reader picks up Mangrove, they won’t only sit in the wings, watching the play unfold, they’ll be immersed in the experience and leave, thinking about it for many days to come.” Read the full review.

• And in New Ohio Review, Evan Green writes, “Mangrove is a moving reflection on a queer life lived to the fullest…Hollands shows us a person grappling with love and loss and glitz—the vibrancy of television, of nature, of a yearning self.” Read the full review.

I’m honored that Mangrove has been named a finalist for a few awards, including the Last Syllable Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur, and the Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry. You know what they say: It’s an honor just to have been nominated. :-)

By the way, you can purchase Mangrove from Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or directly from the publisher. In Seattle, it’s available at Elliott Bay Book Company, Open Books, Third Place Books, Phinney Books, and Common Area Maintenance. And around the country you can find it at independent bookstores such as Powell’s (Portland, OR), Grolier Poetry Book Shop (Cambridge, MA), Kramers (Washington, DC), and Books & Books (Miami, FL). Please support independent bookstores when you can!

I’m thankful to the following writers and editors who have interviewed me over the past year about the book and my writing in general (click through to watch, read, or listen to the interview): Timothy Green on the Rattlecast podcast, Luke Rolfes in the Laurel Review, Kathleen Alcalá on the SoundPages podcast, and Diane Gottlieb in JMWW.

And I gave A LOT of readings this past year, which has been super fun, starting with my book launch last August at the delightful Vermillion Art Gallery & Bar. Thanks to everyone who came out for it, and especially to those who traveled from out of town. It was a dream.

Other readings included the following (click through to watch video recordings, when available): Hugo House (Seattle), Jack Straw Cultural Center (Seattle), Poets at the Postmark (Auburn, WA), Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle), DMQ Virtual Salon (online), the Seattle Public Library (central library), Williams College (online), Imprint Bookshop (Port Townsend, WA), SoulFood (Redmond, WA), and Collections: A Live Magazine (Seattle).

The other big part of last year was finishing up my one-year fellowship with the Jack Straw Writers Program here in Seattle. Some of the readings and interviews above were thanks to this great program. They also provided me with fantastic vocal and performance coaching. But the best part was getting to know the wonderful Jack Straw staff and this amazing, talented cohort of Jack Straw writers. Oh, and there’s an anthology of our work that you can buy!

Speaking of Jack Straw, I can’t wait to be in conversation with fellow Jack Straw writer Jason Prokowiew about his beautiful new memoir War Boys. We’ll be at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle on September 8th at 7pm.

My other upcoming readings include:

• Collections: A Live Magazine
  Wednesday, September 2, 6:30 pm
  Hugo House (and live streamed)
  1634 11th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122

• Author Series @ Palm Springs Cultural Center
  Thursday, Oct. 22, 2026, 12:00 pm
  Palm Springs Cultural Center
  2300 East Baristo Road, Palm Springs, CA 92262

Lastly, I’ve been writing some new poems! Not the firehose of the previous five years; more like a steady trickle. Nevertheless, I’m grateful for each new poem; the greatest joy is in the writing itself. Over the past year I have had new poems published in 32 Poems, Pleiades, Poet Lore, The Worcester Review, Western Humanities Review, and Tyger Quarterly, all of which are available only in print. But here’s a new one that’s available online from New Ohio Review. It’s my second poem based on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (the first one is in the book). How many Mary Tyler Moore poems will I write in my lifetime? Who knows?

Other Thoughts

Like many poets and poetry lovers, I am taking the Sealey Challenge in August. This challenge was created a few years ago by the poet Nicole Sealey because she wanted to push herself to read more, and the idea took off. The goal is to read one book of poetry each day in August.

I’ve never done it before because, frankly, I was certain I would fail. Have you ever tried to read an entire book of poetry in one sitting or one day? It’s hard! In fact, I find it pretty much impossible. Reading poetry requires a certain kind of concentration and attention (that’s one of the great things about it), and I tend to lose focus after about ten poems.

However, inspired by my writers group, I’ve decided to try it this year, but I’m going to cheat. I mean, there’s not going to be test, right? Here are my cheats:

• Chapbooks count (chapbooks are little poetry booklets, usually about a third or half as long as full-length collections).

• I started early (in mid-July), and I’ll just keep going until I’ve read thirty-one books (probably around mid-September). This means I can take 1-2 days for a chapbook and 2-3 days for a full-length collection.

• In addition to new-to-me books, I can reread a few old favorites

To be fair, the nice folks running the Sealey Challenge encourage such cheats; they call them, generously, “modifications.” The whole point is to read more poetry; whatever gets you to do that is just fine.

So, I’ve already been at this for a couple of weeks now, and here are my favorites thus far:

• A Plumber’s Guide to Light by Jesse Bertron. I loved this chapbook when I first read it a few years ago, and I think I loved it even more this time around. The poems are mostly about working as a plumber’s apprentice — his relationship to the work and to his mentors. I would not expect to have much in common with this subject; my husband can attest that I’m not exactly handy around the house. But the poems are so poignant, funny, and immediate that I was right there with them the whole time; they felt like they were being written in real time and just for me. Here is one of my favorites, an achingly tender poem about his mother, who is losing her memory. The chapbook is this young poet’s first collection (it was published in 2021), and I’ve looked for more recent work online but haven’t found any. I don’t know if he’s still writing; I really hope so. I sent him a note through his website to tell him how much this book means to me, but I haven’t heard back yet.

• Terminal Surreal by Martha Silano. This book, published last year, was the author’s final full-length collection; she passed away in 2025 from ALS. The book is mostly about her journey with that disease, and it’s just incredible. She writes with such freedom, but that freedom is balanced by control. Her whip-smart mind makes associative leaps from the personal to the scientific to the literary to the surreal, and she can masterfully shift the tone from hilarious to heartbreaking — and all of this can happen in a single poem. Amazing. I didn’t know Martha, but I know people who did; she was a bright light in the Seattle poetry community. Here’s the opening poem from the collection, entitled “Can’t Complain.” Incredible, no?

Finally…

Thanks again for subscribing to my newsletter — and for reading to the end! Look for another one of these in about three months. In the meantime, you can always check my website for the latest on my readings, publications, etc. You can also drop me a note there, or send me an email. I’d love to hear from you!

Many thanks, and take good care.

~Bill