“In her heart-breaking and wondrous new collection, Dissolve, Holaday Mason accomplishes the seemingly impossible act of making the unraveling of marriage into a theater of luminous wisdom. In showing us how love itself is often insoluble even in the grieving for a past, she illuminates the complex process of reckoning and forgiveness . . . Elegant in their composure and electric in their passions, these poems combine to make a truly extraordinary collection.”
—David St. John
“These are poems that examine the strangeness of the self, the hardships of a shared life with someone we can’t help hurting or being hurt by, the pain of living without and the grappling with lost love, the way such loss shadows us, ‘the new companion that follows.’ Mason is a poet who knows ‘the limits of language/fill the sky,’ and it is into that vastness that she breathes these daring, beautiful words.”
—Natasha Trethewey
Dissolve “is a slender lyric jewel. Its brilliance comes from its sensual luster coupled with the compelling drama of the aching self, surging toward various conflagrations of completion . . . The urgent theatrics take place in a sea of sinuously polished landscapes, which turn thinking and remembering (and feeling) into something palpable, something determinedly physical. I love Mason’s instructive intensity and will, her grace and ability to translate desire into something scary yet gorgeous.”
—David Dodd Lee
Read poems from Dissolve
—David St. John
“These are poems that examine the strangeness of the self, the hardships of a shared life with someone we can’t help hurting or being hurt by, the pain of living without and the grappling with lost love, the way such loss shadows us, ‘the new companion that follows.’ Mason is a poet who knows ‘the limits of language/fill the sky,’ and it is into that vastness that she breathes these daring, beautiful words.”
—Natasha Trethewey
Dissolve “is a slender lyric jewel. Its brilliance comes from its sensual luster coupled with the compelling drama of the aching self, surging toward various conflagrations of completion . . . The urgent theatrics take place in a sea of sinuously polished landscapes, which turn thinking and remembering (and feeling) into something palpable, something determinedly physical. I love Mason’s instructive intensity and will, her grace and ability to translate desire into something scary yet gorgeous.”
—David Dodd Lee
Read poems from Dissolve