Down From the Sycamores

$15.99

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. Many

poems originally appeared in notable literary journals, including Boulevard, The Texas

Review, Chelsea, Rhino, and elsewhere. Richard Burgin, Boulevard’s founding editor,

nominated “Four Paintings in the Louvre” for a Pushcart Prize.

A multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction 2025, and Best Small Fictions

2025 nominee, Richard Holinger has written essays, poetry, and fiction published

in Chicago Quarterly Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Southern Review,

Chautauqua, Boulevard, Witness, and elsewhere. His book of poetry, North of Crivitz, and

collection of essays, Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences, earned praise

respectively from Kevin Stein, former Illinois Poet Laureate, and David Hamilton, Editor

Emeritus of The Iowa Review. He earned a M.A. in English from Washington University (St.

Louis) and holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He

has taught English and creative writing on the college and secondary school levels and

currently lives in rural northern Illinois.

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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. Many

poems originally appeared in notable literary journals, including Boulevard, The Texas

Review, Chelsea, Rhino, and elsewhere. Richard Burgin, Boulevard’s founding editor,

nominated “Four Paintings in the Louvre” for a Pushcart Prize.

A multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction 2025, and Best Small Fictions

2025 nominee, Richard Holinger has written essays, poetry, and fiction published

in Chicago Quarterly Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Southern Review,

Chautauqua, Boulevard, Witness, and elsewhere. His book of poetry, North of Crivitz, and

collection of essays, Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences, earned praise

respectively from Kevin Stein, former Illinois Poet Laureate, and David Hamilton, Editor

Emeritus of The Iowa Review. He earned a M.A. in English from Washington University (St.

Louis) and holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He

has taught English and creative writing on the college and secondary school levels and

currently lives in rural northern Illinois.

Pre-order Price: $15.99 List Price: $17.99

Pre-order Price Guarantee until April 25, 2025

RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY: http://finishinglinepress.com

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).