Every Atom

by Erin Coughlin Hollowell

Across distance, the speaker of these poems wrestles with the way her mother’s loss of memory changes the narrative between them. By interrogating the past, fissures in language, and the vagaries of identity, the speaker comes to a recognition that we are all more alike in our humanity than we are different.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 2018

About the author

Erin Coughlin Hollowell is a poet and writer who lives at the end of the road in Alaska. Prior to landing in Alaska, she lived on both coasts, in big cities and small towns, pursuing many different professions from tapestry weaving to arts administration. Currently, she is Executive Director of Storyknife, a women writers' retreat in Homer, Alaska, and the director of the Kahcemak Bay Writers' Conference. Her books Pause, Traveler (2013) and Every Atom (2018) are published by Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. Her latest collection Corvus and Crater was released in 2023 by Salmon Poetry

Reviews

[Kersten Christianson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s work presents loss: the wrangling of it in all of its physical messy form, the deep treks into memory both remembered and not, and the eventual reconciliation of what it is to be alive, “…Just two passing / memories of the stars that spawned us / and sent us on our way into the dark.” Mother, daughter, journey, life, death. Must read!

[Monica Devine · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Every Atom, I feel the salient ache scrawled under Hollowell’s childhood skin, trailed there by her mother’s unflagging disappointment. I hear the rock-hard weight of barbed words and icy silences in their painful conversations. Though a child of a damaged child, Hollowell is not so consumed as to be despairing. The way weeds resist uprooting, she is persistent in her pleas for deliverance beyond “the wildfire of my mind” and into rarified air. Brilliant, beautiful lines: at the end of life, “breath loosened at last like a small wave in clear water.” Imagistic, as in: “nothing blooms (…) except broken green beer bottles and soda cans in the dirty ditches.”
In the end, an arcing toward her mother, in sparse memorials, offered with honesty at a time when her mother didn’t recognize whose hands were doing the offering. What I love most about Hollowell’s poems is they elicit a visceral quickening, a discernable shimmering of every atom within, and isn’t that the best measure of noteworthy art?

[Evelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erin Coughlin Hollowell's poetry speaks of poignancy in family situations we were would rather not find ourselves in, particularly in times of loss, or helplessness across the miles. This collection is superb, deserving the support she received from Arts organizations. I read this collection today, will gift to others, and shall reread to savor each line.

[Tina Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how this book seems so purely unplugged, so undistracted from less important things. The poems feel as if they were written at the end of a road, with a deep connection to nature and an impressive distance from frivolity.

There were so many lines in this collection that slayed me:

"...your//silence may smother/ me, may be the one//space too many/after the period."

And this was so true and rich:

Oh Mother, I would
fill you to brimming with this shine,
this satisfaction.

Show you how a strand of spider-silk,
connecting the nothing
in front of me with the nothing

yet to come, sparks as it sails
on the unseen air.


I look forward to reading many more of Erin's poems!

[Lisa Stice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erin Coughlin Hollowell's collection beautifully and heart-wrenchingly visits the complications of familial relationships, loss of memory, and the death of a parent. And how in those moments, one comes to terms with identity.

[Twila Newey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The images in each of these poems blew me away. Her language for loss is so vast and the subject(s) impermanence, mother, daughter, human--what those words/categories/names mean, her examination of shift--that was deeply interesting and skillfully wrought. I would recommend this collection.