Praise for As If Scattered

“As If Scattered is rich with penetrating insights into all the various hidden corners of being human. The poems here are surrounded with that otherwise ‘unseen unshared tenderness’ that arises when we take risks in love and creativity, when we face our inner worlds and our relationships with acceptance. They look unflinchingly at love, aging, and death with an unwaveringly empathic eye.” 
—Judith Pacht, author of Infirmary for a Private Soul & A Cumulous Fiction

“These evocations between poet and the body of the self & the beloved, mortality, dream, psyche, fable, heart, and time, transport as they witness and instruct in an intimate landscape that, at times, stuns with skilled linguistic precision and an opulence found within lyric constraint. Readers are in for a treat in this poet’s gritty, grand, and mystical hands: ‘Come close to me my love, close as you can. / When you get here / I will make you something nice.’ Well, who can resist that?” 
—Michelle Bitting, Pacific Palisades Poet Laureate (2012) & author of Notes to the Beloved

“The poems here are raw yet elegant. They are erotic, direct, detailed, musical and carry with them moments of joyful experience, but also the desolate fears, that for all of us, lurk ahead. This poet’s language is ravishing! The final elegy for the poet’s mother is breathtaking. I have read every word of this collection. Lucky me! Buy this book and read it!” 
—Susan Terris, author of Memos

“In Holaday Mason’s poems there’s the sense of having come through, of having arrived at ‘moments / you can’t make up,’ moments urgently evergreen. Imperfection is here too, and illness, wars, the endless bad news and old demons, losses that no one escapes. And time, always time. That’s how it works. Yet there’s beauty in that, too, as these poems so memorably show us: ‘Midsummer behind us—a leaping wild fox.’ Moments, and poems, like this are not soon forgotten.” 
—Mary Ann Samyn, author of Captivity Narrative