Featured Books
Manure Dreams & Other Essays | 2026
Manure Dreams and Other Stories is a collection of travel, memoir, descriptive, humour, and nature essays, all sewn together with the themes of writing, teaching, and literature. Most of the essays involve situations leading to humorous or epiphanic outcomes. As Joan Didion famously asserted, she didn’t know how she felt about something until she wrote about it; with the process of writing comes clarity and, perhaps, instruction. By describing what happened, Richard Holinger is led to understandings that often reveal a universal theme.
One evening on a fly-fishing pond he discovers how he’s influenced unusually an acquaintance not met for fifty years. Or, asked to be the guest speaker (when not Catholic or a Knight) at a Knights of Columbus dinner celebrating 8th graders who won a writing contest responding to what it is to be an American, he discovers patriotism.
One essay was deemed “Notable” in Best American Essays 2018, edited by Hilton Als; others appear in journals Chautauqua, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Hobart, Cutleaf, among others.
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Manure Dreams reclaims all the pleasures of the personal essay—a delight in scrupulously observed detail, a reflexive intelligence, deliberately self-effacing, always willing to examine its own attitudes and motivities, a delight in the unexpected weight of ordinary occasions. Holinger has a fine sense of the incongruous—the charming oddities of a small Kansas town where he taught for a year, a comic evening as the guest speaker at an Illinois Knights of Columbus literary awards dinner, boyhood summers in the title essay on a farm with the requisite animals and manure with a Pullman train car as its “mansion.” Throughout this collection we are treated to a poet’s sense of image and a fiction writer’s ability to capture a character in brief bits of conversation.
—Michael Anania, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago; Poetry and Literary Editor, Swallow Press; author of The Red Menace, Selected Poems, Riversongs
The profound insights in Richard Holinger’s wry, appealing essays often originate in what’s closest at hand—working, teaching, walking, or writing—where meaning arrives not in grand gestures but in the familiar, uncelebrated facts of daily life. Whether he’s considering the foibles of his students, a charged encounter with a stranger, or his own family across generations, Holinger’s journeys from observation to reflection offer gifts for him and his readers. “Each letter tapped out is a finger tracing the journey over the folds,” he writes, “Until the last one leads me home.” These are wise and valuable essays.—Joe Bonomo, author of Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays and No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing
With a keen, observant eye, author Richard Holinger writes with deep sensitivity about the literary life, family, and the power of travel. These essays offer an honest journey into the shared human conditions of love and longing revealed through the heart of a poet.
—David W. Berner, author of the poetry collection, Garden Tools and the novella, American Moon
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$18.99
Unimaginable Things | Forthcoming
Unimaginable Things and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction ranging from minimalist to innovative to realistic, along with various lengths, from microfiction to traditional. The first halfcontains surreal, lyrical, Kafkaesque fictions, while “Henry Holcomb, Esquire,” a novella, juxtaposes the initial speculative stories with droll, semi-autobiographical pieces with a heavy helping of emerging adolescent conflict and angst.
Many of the fictions have appeared in literary journals such as Beloit Fiction Journal, Cream City Review, Sundog, Vestal Review, Oyez Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Witness, Constellations, Fatal Flaw, I-70 Review, The Iowa Review, Midway Journal, and elsewhere.
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Richard Holinger’s stories are brief, piercing, and addictive—echoing Chekhov’s clarity, Dybek’s strangeness, and García Márquez’s haunted magic. Unimaginable Things fulfills the promise of the short story as “a glimpse caught from the corner of the eye in passing,” lingering long after you finish the last page and turn off the lights, continuing to glow the way the best books do. ~John McNally, The Book of Ralph
Richard Holinger, in his most recent collection, Unimaginable Things, expertly explores the mendacity behind the mundane. The lives of Holinger’s characters are extraordinarily ordinary, and so much so life itself is a peril, and “The only way for a man to get something to happen that is extraordinary is to push himself,” from a cliff. Holinger walks the line between real and the unreal with virtuosic precision, a craftsman at the peak of his craft. ~Ralph Pennel is the author of A World Less Perfect for Dying In and the Editor-in-Chief of Midway Journal
Holinger’s stories stroll along the backroads and byways of America, inviting us to glimpse the people and places and see ourselves reflected. These stories are lives captured in brief, fleeting moments that linger with the reader well beyond the final page. ~B.J. Hollars, author of Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief
Richard Holinger’s collection Unimaginable Things reads like a fever dream, a dive into leech-infested waters, that time you and a childhood friend strapped on boxing gloves and agreed that punches to the face were acceptable. All three leave you gasping. As you dive into Hollinger’s stories, prepare yourself for cocaine binges, taxi drivers with gold on every finger. musings on Sarah Palin, and the wanderings across the American Midwest by a man named Henry. ~Bob Johnson, author of The Continental Divide
Richard Holinger is a master of the short short story voiced in American vernacular. His stories are always absurd, fantastic, and elusive—one step ahead of meaning. Still, trying to wrap your head around them is well worth the effort. Each story is a reward, delight. Hats off. ~Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Fat Time and Other Stories and Song of the Shank
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An Advance Sale Discount price of $10 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $14.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
Down from the Sycamores | 2025
Down from the Sycamores recognizes artistic feats, both fatuous and fabulous: from a Centre Pompidou street artist to Le Louvre's masterpieces; from intransigents throwing insults across subway tracks to intricate inlays and tapestries of the Loire Valley's chateaux; from seductive Parisian nights to readers of the night sky seeking landfall. These lyric poems pay homage to the human passion for shared connectedness-with the past, with nature, and with their fellow earth voyagers.
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For those of us who have been to Paris, and those who only dream of going, Richard Holinger‘s new book of poems is a treasure trove of words and images. Holinger begins with a bizarre account of a streetwise “fire-eater,” then captures the everyday lives of transients in the Paris metro. He moves seamlessly to the more aesthetic realms of the Louvre, an ekphrastic celebration, and finally on to the “polar express,” in which readers become virtual Arctic explorers. Holinger’s adventure of art and ice propels us on a journey in which the unexpected astonishes and delights the reader, from start to finish.
–Donna Pucciani has published worldwide, in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, ParisLitUp, and her work has been translated into German, Chinese, Japanese, and Italian. A recent seventh poetry collection, EDGES, has been followed by her new chapbook, Ghost Garden.
Chief among the many pleasures to be found in Richard Holinger’s Down from the Sycamores is the poet’s ekphrastic poems, or poems about paintings. Holinger’s lush descriptions, subtle forging of narratives, and economical wit make these paintings come alive, as in “Arcimboldo’s Faces,” in which “an apparition / is implied in the pairing of opposites, / a fruition of facing / one’s worst reflection in untried glass.” Here, as elsewhere in the book, what ekphrastic poems do above all is to measure “the gazer’s spirit,” in Shelley’s words. This collection also includes tactile and historically resonant depictions of the Loire Valley, marked by “rain / leaving warm mosaic prints,” and an astonishingly inhabited and paced rendition of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s failed 1916 sea voyage to Antarctica. Down from the Sycamores is a variegated bouquet of lyric thought, sound, and sight, which will move as well as enliven the reader.
–Christina Pugh is a Consulting Editor for Poetry, the 2019 Juniper Prize winner, a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship recipient, and a professor of English at University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Author of four poetry collections, her most recent book collects her essays on poetry, Ghosts and the Overplus (University of Michigan).
Richard Holinger’s Down from the Sycamores reads like an old-style cabinet of curiosities—each poem opens a drawer to its own precise and glittering arrangement. Holinger knows his influences: European history, the fine arts, and in poetry, and deploys them like “an Olympic runner lighting routes,” that is—expertly. Holinger effectively wields persona and ekphrasis, but at the same time brings his narratives right through our bones, his words wind through “this green forest / in circles right and swift / as swirls in the blue Loire.”
–Sandra Marchetti, author of DIORAMA, Aisle 228, & Confluence
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$17.99
North Of Crivitz | 2020
North of Crivitz is a collection of poems set in the North Woods and the rural Upper Midwest. The poems originate from somewhere in a personal past, from small town taverns to the silent mist floating over a North Woods lake. Most poems unfold in free verse, but a few formal poems snuck in.
Many of the poems have been featured in literary journals such as Boulevard, Kansas Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, The Ohio Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Main Street Rag, Cider Press Review, and others.
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Whatever solace that these taut poems deliver shoulders as much salt as sugar. Here, Holinger’s naturalist’s eye for redemptive detail confronts the realist’s doggedness for a cold-eyed fact. Within these lines, one hears Emerson and Frost wrestling in verdant woods north of Crivitz, the former erecting his spire of “spiritual facts” while the latter’s muddy boot kicks at footings bracing the whole façade. Amid this fervent tussle, the poet hankers for what might “redeem” both himself and the beloved topography he inhabits.
—Kevin Stein, Ph.D., Illinois Poet Laureate 2003-2017, Caterpillar Professor and Director of Bradley University’s Creative Writing Program, author of seven books of poetry, including Wrestling Li Po for the Remote.
Richard Holinger’s North of Crivitz invites the reader into a geography and a life both proudly regional and powerfully resonant. Holinger accurately differentiates the natural lineaments of the rural Midwest, but equally important to him is the “treeless Midwest”: the continual changes wrought by its human-built environment, which mirror the poet’s own changes, losses, and appreciations over time. Speaking with diction “thick in the vowels / and consonants of the Upper Midwest,” Holinger makes a local habitation lyrical—like Frost before him, whose North of Boston echoes in this book’s very title.
—Christina Pugh, author of the 2019 Juniper Prize for Poetry (Stardust Media) and four other books. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, and The Kenyon Review. Awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, she is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a consulting editor for Poetry.
In fine poems where a man finds the way into a place where deer incite him to dance with them, wandering to ponds when days give back to the night, to a woods on County C where stillness is untranslatable yet, often with a fishing pole in hand, nearly always with the past as companion—brother, father, grandparent, wife—Richard Holinger gives us a map to the interior and the way home.
—Carol Frost, author of ten books of poetry, most recently Alias City. Recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is featured in four Pushcart Prize anthologies and is Chair of English at Rollins College.
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$16.00
Kangaroo Rabits and Galvanized Fences | 2020
These mini-essays, originally newspaper columns written for Shaw Media, describe a life of survival: surviving diapers, Pinewood Derby races, and middle school band concerts. Rick Holinger regularly throws his pseudonymous nuclear family under the bus because his children were too young to object, and his wife enjoyed the extra, though paltry, income. No one, however, sacrificed more than the author.
Who else would expose his fatherly and husbandly incompetence by revealing in print the time he burned out the front lawn with First Apply Spring Fertilizer? Or wrinkling his wife’s favorite wrinkle-free pants by leaving them untended and cooling in the dryer for five days? Or forgetting to screw in their inboard-outboard’s drain plug before spring launch, thus owning a bathtub rather than boat?It takes a pillage to raze a family. But Holinger survived. Barely. This book tells how.
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Holinger is obviously a very alert writer, uses language well, has all sorts of inventive phrasing: “coercing a dyslexic to play Scrabble,” for a quick example. The pieces are wonderfully consistent, uniformly good. He has arresting turns of phrase and quotable sentences. The author’s self-effacing good humor is another plus. You wouldn’t listen to a braggart tell such stories; Holinger is closer to the reverse. His moments of victory tend to be inward, observed by us but not always by his family, to whom he can seem more a lucky bumbler. It would prove a fine Christmas gift for friends and neighbors, for people who, like me, share this scene more or less.
—David Hamilton, Editor Emeritus of The Iowa Review,
The author finds insight as well as humor in the ‘ordinariness’ of his and our world. The whimsy both in observations and in point of view makes the pieces ‘original’ even as the matters they address are thoroughly familiar. Mr. Holinger’s voice and style are idiosyncratic even as his immediate subjects are conventional, and it is these qualities that provide the fun of his writing. He can be both self-deprecating and slyly wise in a highly attractive way I greatly enjoyed it. The writing is first rate and the goal is amusement.
—Wayne Fields, Ph.D., Washington University American literature professor and Lynne Harvey Cooper Emeritus Chair in English claims
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$12.95