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Winter Stranger: Poems
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.
In the cold, seminal countryside of eastern Washington, a boy puts a bullet through his skull in a high school parking lot. An uncle crushes oxycodone into “a thousand red granules.” Hawks wheel above a dark, indifferent river. “I left that town / forever,” Holbert writes, but its bruises appear everywhere, in dreams of violent men and small stars, the ghosts of friends and pills. These poems incite a complex emotional discourse on what it means to leave—if it’s ever actually possible, or if our roots only grow longer to accommodate the distance.
Punctuated by recollections of loved ones consumed by their addictions, Winter Stranger also questions the capricious nature of memory, and poetry’s power to tame it. “I can make it all sound so beautiful. / You’ll barely notice that underneath / this poem there is a body / decaying into the American ground.” Meanwhile, the precious realities vanish—“your hair, your ears, your hands.”—leaving behind “the fucked up / trees,” the “long, cold river.” In verse both bleak and wishful, Holbert strikes a fine balance between his poetic sensibilities and the endemic cynicism of modern life.
“It is clear now that there are no ends,” Holbert writes, “Just winters.” Though his poems bloom from hills heavy with springtime snow, his voice cuts through the cold, rich with dearly familiar to not be alone, to honor our origins, to survive them.
In the cold, seminal countryside of eastern Washington, a boy puts a bullet through his skull in a high school parking lot. An uncle crushes oxycodone into “a thousand red granules.” Hawks wheel above a dark, indifferent river. “I left that town / forever,” Holbert writes, but its bruises appear everywhere, in dreams of violent men and small stars, the ghosts of friends and pills. These poems incite a complex emotional discourse on what it means to leave—if it’s ever actually possible, or if our roots only grow longer to accommodate the distance.
Punctuated by recollections of loved ones consumed by their addictions, Winter Stranger also questions the capricious nature of memory, and poetry’s power to tame it. “I can make it all sound so beautiful. / You’ll barely notice that underneath / this poem there is a body / decaying into the American ground.” Meanwhile, the precious realities vanish—“your hair, your ears, your hands.”—leaving behind “the fucked up / trees,” the “long, cold river.” In verse both bleak and wishful, Holbert strikes a fine balance between his poetic sensibilities and the endemic cynicism of modern life.
“It is clear now that there are no ends,” Holbert writes, “Just winters.” Though his poems bloom from hills heavy with springtime snow, his voice cuts through the cold, rich with dearly familiar to not be alone, to honor our origins, to survive them.
- GenresPoetry
77 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 13, 2023
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111 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
December 9, 2025
Reads like butter in your mouth, stings like salt on a cut.
January 22, 2026
melancholic, soft, beautiful. i really loved these poems. i was reminded of crush by richard siken, but less edgy, more contemplative and suburban and cold
April 2, 2024
13 June 2023
B.A. Van Sise for the New York Journal of Books
Life, for all its foibles, also has its little justices: you miss the bus and meet the lovely boy waiting for the next one. They hire somebody else and the company promptly folds. You skip the game before the rainstorm, by surprise, floods the field.
And poor Max Ritvo dies before he can ever release all the beauty he owes the world, live all the days the world owes him—but every year, it seems, one of the best new books of poetry is released with his name on it. It is not fair but, oh, it is poetry.
Every year Milkweed brings to a young poet the chance that cancer never afforded poor Max, and every year they put out a stunner. If ever there were a ghost in the machine, it’s this—a generation of poets we’ve now all heard of, brought to us by the poet we never got to hear enough from.
And so it goes, once again, here, with now-you’ve-heard-of-him poet Jackson Holbert and his first book, Winter Stranger, selected by Henri Cole for this year’s Max Ritvo Prize. It is customary to always include some glimmer of hope in a terrible review and some anchor of negativity in a rave, so let’s get it out of the way at the fore: Winter Stranger is a lousy title, cold and bloodless for a book that is in every other way plenty superb.
The state of Washington is full of life: ocean currents bring heavy endless rains to drench the coast and blanket the western part of the state with verdant cold-weather rainforests that stretch all the way until its soft bays give way to cities, swapping millions of roots for millions of legs, until the cities turn into crops: miles and miles of food and flora that bracket the state with life, glorious life, a mask on the only thing that gives life meaning. Here, Holbert lets us know that his home can’t have so much life if it can’t but have just as much death; that every stalk, eventually, faces a thresher.
Bound in a rock-solid hardcover that still, somehow, is bruised, Holbert unravels the browning of the Evergreen State.
“When we travel / the dead travel too,” Holbert opens the book. “That is the law / and the law is full of dreams / It’s April. We’re dying / again, all of us, among poplars.” A downer note to begin a book, but true to everything that follows.
The actor Michael Caine once said his primary qualification for deciding whether he liked a script was to turn to the last page and see if he’s still in it.
It’s hard to imagine such last pages when Holbert paints an idyllic place as far from ideal, making plain the mundane, but also to turn its brooks and birdsongs into guttural scratch: girls who beat cats with padlocks, townies who do drugs like candy because, well, in a way, it is. Coyotes that fumble for yard dogs, power lines that fill the suburbs with static hum, hearts that break, limbs that fracture, fertilizer that leaches into loam.
It is a book where everyone leaves, as if carried by river, as if held by current that came from an unknown place, that goes to an unknown place, a rill that runs ever with life itself. Home, here, is a place where we lose resemblances, not just to our fathers and grandfathers and mothers alike, but in a flush of pills and powders and escapes to that river shed the appearance, even, of ourselves.
The American backyard, here, is a breeding ground for war: “everything depends on boys who know nothing . . .” writes Holbert, “the country depends on them, senators, kindergarteners, mailmen depend on them, those boys standing in the rain, the creases in their hats filling almost comically with water.” That war is afar and oh-so-close: the war of stray cats in foreign lands and kids popping pills in Seattle. The war is right here, standing in the rain, running into the fertilizer, running water into running water running among people running. “Poisonous rivers make / poisonous ice,” Holbert writes in “Landscape.” “In every mailbox / for a dozen miles / there’s the same letter.”
Which brings us back to Michael Caine, and to our last page. Are we still on the last page of the script of our lives? “It would be nice to hear you say . . . that the rooms we walked through” Holbert closes the book, “years ago picked up our conversations, / that not everything was lost just after it was said.”
This is a fine, fine book, that in its end does not close, but merely dies.
B.A. Van Sise for the New York Journal of Books
Life, for all its foibles, also has its little justices: you miss the bus and meet the lovely boy waiting for the next one. They hire somebody else and the company promptly folds. You skip the game before the rainstorm, by surprise, floods the field.
And poor Max Ritvo dies before he can ever release all the beauty he owes the world, live all the days the world owes him—but every year, it seems, one of the best new books of poetry is released with his name on it. It is not fair but, oh, it is poetry.
Every year Milkweed brings to a young poet the chance that cancer never afforded poor Max, and every year they put out a stunner. If ever there were a ghost in the machine, it’s this—a generation of poets we’ve now all heard of, brought to us by the poet we never got to hear enough from.
And so it goes, once again, here, with now-you’ve-heard-of-him poet Jackson Holbert and his first book, Winter Stranger, selected by Henri Cole for this year’s Max Ritvo Prize. It is customary to always include some glimmer of hope in a terrible review and some anchor of negativity in a rave, so let’s get it out of the way at the fore: Winter Stranger is a lousy title, cold and bloodless for a book that is in every other way plenty superb.
The state of Washington is full of life: ocean currents bring heavy endless rains to drench the coast and blanket the western part of the state with verdant cold-weather rainforests that stretch all the way until its soft bays give way to cities, swapping millions of roots for millions of legs, until the cities turn into crops: miles and miles of food and flora that bracket the state with life, glorious life, a mask on the only thing that gives life meaning. Here, Holbert lets us know that his home can’t have so much life if it can’t but have just as much death; that every stalk, eventually, faces a thresher.
Bound in a rock-solid hardcover that still, somehow, is bruised, Holbert unravels the browning of the Evergreen State.
“When we travel / the dead travel too,” Holbert opens the book. “That is the law / and the law is full of dreams / It’s April. We’re dying / again, all of us, among poplars.” A downer note to begin a book, but true to everything that follows.
The actor Michael Caine once said his primary qualification for deciding whether he liked a script was to turn to the last page and see if he’s still in it.
It’s hard to imagine such last pages when Holbert paints an idyllic place as far from ideal, making plain the mundane, but also to turn its brooks and birdsongs into guttural scratch: girls who beat cats with padlocks, townies who do drugs like candy because, well, in a way, it is. Coyotes that fumble for yard dogs, power lines that fill the suburbs with static hum, hearts that break, limbs that fracture, fertilizer that leaches into loam.
It is a book where everyone leaves, as if carried by river, as if held by current that came from an unknown place, that goes to an unknown place, a rill that runs ever with life itself. Home, here, is a place where we lose resemblances, not just to our fathers and grandfathers and mothers alike, but in a flush of pills and powders and escapes to that river shed the appearance, even, of ourselves.
The American backyard, here, is a breeding ground for war: “everything depends on boys who know nothing . . .” writes Holbert, “the country depends on them, senators, kindergarteners, mailmen depend on them, those boys standing in the rain, the creases in their hats filling almost comically with water.” That war is afar and oh-so-close: the war of stray cats in foreign lands and kids popping pills in Seattle. The war is right here, standing in the rain, running into the fertilizer, running water into running water running among people running. “Poisonous rivers make / poisonous ice,” Holbert writes in “Landscape.” “In every mailbox / for a dozen miles / there’s the same letter.”
Which brings us back to Michael Caine, and to our last page. Are we still on the last page of the script of our lives? “It would be nice to hear you say . . . that the rooms we walked through” Holbert closes the book, “years ago picked up our conversations, / that not everything was lost just after it was said.”
This is a fine, fine book, that in its end does not close, but merely dies.
July 15, 2025
“There’s something to the river’s
indifference. What else would let in a baby
but keep out the lightning?”
In an interview Jackson Holbert refers to the difference between the “Robert Frost generation” and the “Louise Glück generation” in terms of their relationships with nature and the sublime. The sublime is not what it used to be, in the obvious sense of course, but also in a more mystical sense: there is a collective memory, a pain, a gauzy overwriting of every mountain and woodland and wide open space. And the earth minds this, but we mind it more. I love how Holbert describes beautiful things with such flippancy but that doesn’t mean they don’t take his breath away. My favorite poem is “Poem With a Smoke Cloud Hanging in It”:
“Today I will sit
in the grass and smell
the sunlight. I will leave
the pills in their bottles,
I will leave the bottles
by my bed. I will walk
to the insane river. I will let
the crazy wind cut and curve
around me. I will close
my eyes and dream
of medical sewage
poisoning the river a hundred
miles upstream. And somewhere
in all that trash
there is a little hit
of morphine. I will think
if nothing ever leaves
then the wind is full
of all the smoke I ever blew.
And if nothing ever leaves
does that mean I’m still
dopesick at fifteen, telling
my parents the flu is going around?
If I am then so what.
I am also walking through the cemetery
at dawn, friends
on both sides of me—our little
drunken army marching
out of the night.
If I am, then so what. I am also
lying in my bed at twenty-two staring
so deeply at the bark beetle-riddled trees
that I don’t notice
the vacant light lessening then
leaving entirely. I don’t notice
when the night climbs into my bed
like a terrified brother and the wind
slams the door.”
indifference. What else would let in a baby
but keep out the lightning?”
In an interview Jackson Holbert refers to the difference between the “Robert Frost generation” and the “Louise Glück generation” in terms of their relationships with nature and the sublime. The sublime is not what it used to be, in the obvious sense of course, but also in a more mystical sense: there is a collective memory, a pain, a gauzy overwriting of every mountain and woodland and wide open space. And the earth minds this, but we mind it more. I love how Holbert describes beautiful things with such flippancy but that doesn’t mean they don’t take his breath away. My favorite poem is “Poem With a Smoke Cloud Hanging in It”:
“Today I will sit
in the grass and smell
the sunlight. I will leave
the pills in their bottles,
I will leave the bottles
by my bed. I will walk
to the insane river. I will let
the crazy wind cut and curve
around me. I will close
my eyes and dream
of medical sewage
poisoning the river a hundred
miles upstream. And somewhere
in all that trash
there is a little hit
of morphine. I will think
if nothing ever leaves
then the wind is full
of all the smoke I ever blew.
And if nothing ever leaves
does that mean I’m still
dopesick at fifteen, telling
my parents the flu is going around?
If I am then so what.
I am also walking through the cemetery
at dawn, friends
on both sides of me—our little
drunken army marching
out of the night.
If I am, then so what. I am also
lying in my bed at twenty-two staring
so deeply at the bark beetle-riddled trees
that I don’t notice
the vacant light lessening then
leaving entirely. I don’t notice
when the night climbs into my bed
like a terrified brother and the wind
slams the door.”
January 22, 2024
A friend gave this book to me, because she thought it could inform my poetry on grief (and similar themes) and for my love of the press. I left this collection with mixed feelings, hence the rating. I think many of the poems are compelling, especially in the first section, and I am particularly drawn to the epistolary poems, with the Jakob ones being the most interesting.
Many of my qualms with this collection lie within the form, or perhaps lack thereof, of a majority of the pieces. I focus on form quite a bit in my writing, so I place the same weight on what I read. Form for a lot of these poems seemed like a second thought, often leaving out opportunity for interesting enjambment, etc. With moments of striking imagery and narration, some condensing of the longer poems would make them stronger. Also, I understand that winter as a concept and pills are both major themes, but these two (especially pills) ended up becoming fragments of semantic satiation, and felt like they were being forced down the audience's throat. As standalone poems, I think I would've trusted them more, but as a collection, it seems like shock-effect of the image is a rhetorical method the author is shooting for, but is lost in the repetition. That, along with the WWI poems and the afterwards of such big literary names left me disappointed the further I read. If anything, I am excited to see where this poet's work takes him, because I do think his narration is quite compelling.
Many of my qualms with this collection lie within the form, or perhaps lack thereof, of a majority of the pieces. I focus on form quite a bit in my writing, so I place the same weight on what I read. Form for a lot of these poems seemed like a second thought, often leaving out opportunity for interesting enjambment, etc. With moments of striking imagery and narration, some condensing of the longer poems would make them stronger. Also, I understand that winter as a concept and pills are both major themes, but these two (especially pills) ended up becoming fragments of semantic satiation, and felt like they were being forced down the audience's throat. As standalone poems, I think I would've trusted them more, but as a collection, it seems like shock-effect of the image is a rhetorical method the author is shooting for, but is lost in the repetition. That, along with the WWI poems and the afterwards of such big literary names left me disappointed the further I read. If anything, I am excited to see where this poet's work takes him, because I do think his narration is quite compelling.
June 23, 2023
Maybe it's just that this book found me at the perfect time, when its themes are all very present on my mind and I'm having a lot of similar reckonings, but this was such a great read. When reading any collection of work I always bookmark my favorites.I had to stop on this one because I was bookmarking almost everything, but I did find "The Water Poem" and everything directed toward Jakob especially breathtaking. There were a few poems that felt a little unpolished/out of place compared to everything else, but I'm still giving a full five stars because I'm not going to drag down someone's Goodreads rating based on a couple perceived imperfections in what is otherwise an incredibly strong, moving debut.
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June 9, 2024I love, love, love when you discover a new poet, spend a night devouring their only book, look up their name on Google, find their website, read more of their published poems, and promptly discover their video on youtube: “Dove shampoo taste test”.
Obsessed. Obsessed.
Obsessed. Obsessed.
July 20, 2023
Estrany, preciós, hivernal.
September 19, 2023
it kinda just felt like somebody was really angry at me the whole time. like my really close friend got depressed and took it out on me.
December 7, 2023
"graciously
you give my suffering
a name
graciously
my suffering
gives itself another"
you give my suffering
a name
graciously
my suffering
gives itself another"
December 23, 2023
Loved it
June 17, 2024
I listened to the Audible version of this book and it is incredible, very moving. I highly recommend giving it a listen.
February 28, 2025
I didn't really know too much about this going in to it...but it does capture America in it's present moment to some degree, or a certain variety of life as we live it.
April 24, 2025
I’m sure I’ll update this when I read the book but Jackson is such a great mentor and so I already feel like this is 5 star worthy
August 15, 2025
Great use of color and wonder.
February 17, 2026
When a thing is gone forever
you don’t hold on to it,
that’s just not true. You watch it
turn weightless and bizarre
and slip through your large hands
and into the earth forever.
you don’t hold on to it,
that’s just not true. You watch it
turn weightless and bizarre
and slip through your large hands
and into the earth forever.
January 13, 2025
A collection of poetry centered on grief, loss, and the heart of an American suburbia rife with violence, drugs, and death. Intermingling tenderness and brutality, Holbert's attempts at connection—to home, to memory, to loved ones—are constantly rebuffed by the constancy of loss, which comes like the seasons, year over year. And yet still one must cherish these moments ("A long life full of terror is still a long life.") because they are all we will ever have. This thread of sentimentality is stronger in the earlier poems of this collection, and by far my favorite; they felt personal, a microcosm of human tragedy that still manages to offer some catharsis through the sheer act of exhuming those feelings through writing. These poems are a small way of memorializing those sentimental moments against such institutional powers—drugs, mental illness, war—as one slogs, step by step, through a long and cold winter
May 11, 2024
Truly phenomenal
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