Joan Houlihan

Who is Joan Houlihan?

Joan Houlihan is an American poet. She is the author of four books, most recently Ay, a sequel to The Us. Timothy Donnelly has described Ay as “one of the most radically inventive and invigorating books of poetry I’ve read in years," while Ilya Kaminsky describes Ay as "breathtakingly inventive and yet deeply humane...a narrative and song at once; it is talismanic."

Her other books are The Mending Worm, winner of the 2005 Green Rose Prize in Poetry, and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays which includes her series of essays on contemporary American poetry called The Boston Comment. The essays drew a great deal of attention for their criticism of both traditional and what she termed "post-avant" poetry, occasioning responses from Fred Moramarco of Poetry International and a wide range of letters from the poetry community both favorable and critical Houlihan is a staff reviewer for the Contemporary Poetry Review.

Her work has appeared widely in many journals and magazines, among them Boston Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Arts, Fulcrum, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Poetry International, Poetry, VOLT, and has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present.