Hilary Holladay’s latest book is The Power of Adrienne Rich, a New York Times Top Book of 2020 and the first comprehensive biography of the iconic feminist poet and activist.
Times reviewer Dwight Garner writes, “The Power of Adrienne Rich … allows us to meet this prickly poet fresh and entire.” Writing for the Times Literary Supplement, Heather Clark observes, “One of the great pleasures of reading this biography is discovering how Rich fought her way out of … a soul-deadening corner to become not just a major poet, but one of the foremost feminist and queer activists of her generation.” And Bonnie Morris writes in The Gay & Lesbian Review, “In The Power of Adrienne Rich, Hilary Holladay invites us to explore one of feminism’s greatest conflicts: how women rely upon critical approval, success, and cultural standing in the patriarchal establishment to advance work that inveighs against patriarchy.”
Hilary Holladay’s writings—spanning biography, journalism, poetry, and fiction—chronicle the lives of people on the outskirts of society, whether culturally, geographically, or otherwise. Her nonfiction books highlight how Adrienne Rich, Herbert Huncke, Lucille Clifton, and Ann Petry pushed boundaries creatively and socially and helped deepen our understanding of modern and contemporary American society. Hilary’s novel, Tipton, and her poems blend universal themes such as mortality and identity with an appreciation for rural life and the impact of geography on one’s point of view.
Praise for The Power of Adrienne Rich:
“Now comes Hilary Holladay’s taut, engaging “The Power of Adrienne Rich,” which plumbs the career of one of our more complex writers and activists, who, early on, tracked along the same trajectory as Plath and Sexton, but then rocketed into an orbit that blended poetics with politics in dazzling, uncompromising fashion.”
- Hamilton Cane, The Minneapolis Star Tribune
Toni Morrison scholars have had a glorious feeding frenzy dissecting the relationships and historical contexts of Beloved (1987). Still, there’s one element of this ghost story that deserves more attention: the surging, sluicing, wondrous poetry conveying the thoughts of the dead and the living as the novel moves toward its denouement.