And Now, Nowhere But Here
ISBN: 9781947896659
2023, Terrapin Books
$18, 113 pages, paper
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Reviewed by Susan Azar Porterfield
“I make no excuses…. I’m a writer./I can’t help but tell you how it was….”
These lines appear in the prefatory poem of Andrea Hollander’s newest offering And Now, Nowhere But Here. The reader would do well to heed them, because, as intended, they forecast the tone and much of the subject matter of the collection. Within, you will find a poet who seems to be working to puzzle out how she got to where she is, a place that the word “Here” in the book’s title may point to. Hollander is a self-identified, unapologetic, older writer. Thus, memory matters— “tell you how it was”—in her search to piece together the arc of a life.
Hollander is the author of five previous books: House without a Dreamer (1993), The Other Life (2001), Woman in the Painting (2006), Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2012, and Blue Mistaken for Sky (2018). She is also the editor of the anthology When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (2009). She has received two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as two fellowships from the Arkansas Arts Council. For 12 years, she was the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College in Arkansas.
In previous books, Hollander has written about the situation she abruptly found herself in, becoming divorced from a philandering husband, the betrayal, and the rush, resulting from her change in status and situation, of suddenly needing to provide for herself and her son. In other words, life can come at you hard. And here’s the thing— without equivocation or excuse, she acknowledges that she hasn’t been able to close the book on that life-altering event.
“My friend John wants me to stop writing/divorce poems. I’ve tried, I tell him, but can’t.” So begins a piece entitled “Puzzle.” The title illuminates the poem’s crucial point. Hollander confesses here that “puzzles have always/intrigued me, so I don’t give up.” So, what is it about a puzzle, anyway, that intrigues? Ultimately, perhaps, it’s that it assumes that an answer or solution exists, that the world can, indeed, be made whole or understandable, if you’re clever or insightful enough to figure it out.
For poets, wonder about the unknowable world is often what compels them to write poems that by their very natures manifest the ontological puzzle. Thus, no one will ever write the sonnet that defines love once and for all. As Hollander says in “One After Another,” “I don’t remember//why I left him. Or did he leave me?”
Poetry, art in general, is a way of trying to figure out the mystery of how this all works, what “Here” is, actually, and the baffling question of how we got there anyway. I believe that poets, like Hollander, don’t really expect to find answers. They know that it’s the journey, the act of writing itself— “I’m a writer”—that answers the question.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 1.
Susan Azar Porterfield is the author of In the Garden of Our Spines, Kibbe (Mayapple Press) and Dirt, Root, Silk, which won the Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize. Individual poems are in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Barrow Street, EcoTheo, Painted Bride, Mid-American Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Rhino, Puerto del Sol, Poetry Ireland Review, Slipstream, Room, Ambit, Magma. She’s the editor of Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk (Ohio UP) and has written for Poets & Writers, The Writer’s Chronicle, Translation Review, The Midwest Journal of the Modern Language Association. She’s the recipient of an Illinois Arts Counsel Award for Poetry.
Andrea Hollander moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2011, after living for more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she was innkeeper of a bed & breakfast for 15 years and Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College for 22. Hollander’s 5th full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Book Fest; her 4th was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her 1st won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays appear widely in anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, including a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine. Other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and literary nonfiction), two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 2021 49th Parallel Award in Poetry. In 2017 she initiated the Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she conducted in her home, but since the pandemic, via Zoom. Her website is www.andreahollander.net.
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