Hold Like Owls

Hold Like Owls

Selected by 2011 National Book Award winner Nikky Finney as the seventh annual winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, Hold Like Owls is the first book-length collection from Julia Koets. Full of imagery deeply embedded in memories of growing up in the American South, Koets explores what it means to hold—to carry memories—and what to hold onto and what to let go. Birds turn into paper, a voice fits inside a chestnut shell, and moths eat stars through a woolen sky as the collection evokes nuance within the ordinary, reframes childhood memory, and engages the themes of the night, sensuality, and desire. Whether questioning personal histories, language, sexual identity, or love, the collection honors the "gentle corners of the night" that allow for questioning and uncertainty to exist.

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Contents
  • Foreword
  • Acknowledgments
  • I
    • Paper Birds
    • Woman Drawn with Stars
    • Shrug of Broken Egg, Frozen Shell
    • Fruit in Bed
    • White on the Fence
    • Apples and Aristophanes
    • Blue Hour
    • The Sweet of Strawberries
    • When loss leans like a broken tree
    • Gift to a Girl in Phoenix
    • Above the Floor
    • Bruise
    • Wanderings
    • Wide-Eyed and Song
  • II
    • Gentle Corners of the Night
    • About Boats
    • Beauty Secrets
    • Lantern Bloom
    • Boxes of Old Photographs
    • Possums
    • Parking Lot Market
    • Oconee Bells
    • Curve of the Belly
    • Moth and Moon
    • A History of Hair
    • Sun would catch
  • III
    • Calico Street
    • After It's Over
    • For Julia in Little Armenia
    • Octave
    • Early Psalm
    • Buttered Toast
    • Plaster Dust
    • Hold Like Owls
    • Even Haystacks
    • One Afternoon
    • My Quixote
    • Losing Noon
    • When It Starts to Rain in San Francisco
  • IV
    • As Far as March
    • Hidden There
    • Joy, the Elephant, Greenville Zoo, 1990
    • Counting Pelicans
    • Encounters with Buzzards
    • December Hemlock
    • Blue House on Wheat Street
    • Larks at Dawn
    • Kume and the Washerwoman
      • i. Fallen
      • ii. Worn Too Thin
    • Painting on Silk
    • Ruin

Subjects

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