Joan Houlihan’s previous books are The Us, named a must-read of 2009 by Massachusetts Center for the Book, The Mending Worm, winner of the Green Rose Award from New Issues Press, and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays. Her work has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press) and The Book of Irish-American Poetry— Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press). She is founder and director of the Concord Poetry Center and the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference and she has taught at Columbia University and Emerson College. Currently on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she also teaches part-time at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts

Other poems by Joan Houlihan in Verse Daily:
June 26, 2004:  "Let" "August brought the slow flies, tropical..."

Books by Joan Houlihan:

Other poems on the web by Joan Houlihan:
"To Celebrate the Empty Tomb"
Three poems
Three poems
Three poems
"DANCED THE ANTLERS"

Joan Houlihan's Website.

Joan Houlihan According to Wikipedia.

About Ay:

"Musically rugged, riddled with insight, resonant, gripping, and chock-full of moments that startle with their vividness (‘What eats grass slow and bent- / necked, eyed from the side, is deer’) Ay deploys its fertile idiom not only for the pleasure of it, which is immeasurable, but as a medium through which to investigate the mechanics of subjectivity, grief, empathy, and forgiveness. The result is one of the most radically inventive and invigorating books of poetry I’ve read in years"
—Timothy Donnelly

"In a time when so many poets create linguistic fireworks that possess little, if any, emotive depth, Houlihan gives us poetry of passion and lyric, attentiveness that is rich in its textures, tonalities, and rhythmic, memorable speech. Ay is a narrative and song at once: it is talismanic."
—Ilya Kaminsky