North of Crivitz: Poems

North of Crivitz: Poems
Richard Holinger.
American Fork, Utah, Kelsay Books. $16.00. 67 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-952326-38-7

North of Crivitz is a collection of poems set in the North Woods and rural Upper Midwest. The poems originate from somewhere in a personal past, from small town taverns to the silent mist floating over a North Woods lake. Most poems unfold in free verse, but a few formal poems snuck in.

Its publisher, Kelsay Books, is a small independent press. To purchase a copy of North of Crivitz, visit richardholinger.net (available through Amazon or the author). A personal inscription is available upon request.

Many of the poems have been featured in literary journals such as Boulevard, Kansas Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, The Ohio Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Main Street Rag, Cider Press Review, and others.

Kevin Stein, Ph.D., Illinois Poet Laureate 2003-2017, retired Bradley University professor and author of several books of poetry writes, “Holinger’s naturalist’s eye for redemptive detail confronts the realist’s doggedness for cold-eyed fact. Within these lines, one hears Emerson and Frost wrestling in verdant woods north of Crivitz, the former erecting his spire of ‘spiritual facts’ while the latter’s muddy boot kicks at footings bracing the whole façade. Amid this fervent tussle, the poet hankers for what might ‘redeem’ both himself and the beloved topography he inhabits.”

“Richard Holinger’s North of Crivitz invites the reader into a geography and a life both proudly regional and powerfully resonant. Speaking with diction ‘thick in the vowels / and consonants of the Upper Midwest,’ Holinger makes a local habitation lyrical – like Frost before him, whose North of Boston echoes in this book’s very title.”
–Christina Pugh, author of the 2019 Juniper Prize for Poetry (Stardust Media) and four other books. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Kenyon Review and been awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

“In fine poems where a man finds the way in to a place where deer incite him to dance with them, wandering to ponds when days give back to night, to a woods on County C where stillness is untranslatable yet, often with a fishing pole in hand, nearly always with the past as companion, Holinger gives us a map to the interior and the way home.”
–Carol Frost, author of ten books of poetry, most recently Alias City. Recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; featured in four Pushcart Prize anthologies; Chair of English at Rollins College.