The Pressure of All That Light

Holly Painter's third collection charts a course through the tender friendships and lonely queer crushes of childhood and adolescence in Midwestern America and on to the dizzying freedoms of California and the disorientation of love and heartache in New Zealand. Energetic and intimate, these poems blend the personal and the pastoral in their exploration of how we arrive at ourselves.



Holly Painter is the author of Excerpts from a Natural History (Titus, 2015) and My Pet Sounds Off: Translating the Beach Boys (Finishing Line, 2020). Her poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the U.K., Singapore, and China. Born in Michigan, she lives with her wife and two children in Vermont, where she teaches literature and writing at the University of Vermont.