The Dreams of Mary Rowlandson
A poetic retelling of one of history’s most famous captivity records
Mary Rowlandson, a Puritan and prominent community leader, was held captive for 11 weeks as part of the 1676 Indian attack on Lancaster, a small settlement within the Massachusetts Bay colony. Six years after her release, Rowlandson published her first and only book, The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, which would ultimately become America’s first best-seller and establish the genre of the Indian captivity narrative.
In The Dreams of Mary Rowlandson, Hilary Holladay reinvents this historically vital narrative as a series of poems from the perspective of the 38-year-old captive. Drawing directly from excerpts of Rowlandson’s original writings, Holladay’s poems explore Rowlandson’s unique faith and circumstances while simultaneously revealing an underlying, universally human vulnerability.
“These ‘dreams’ humanize Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 captivity narrative and breathe new life into it by imagining her inner voice as both eloquent and honest.”
- D. Quentin Miller, author of “A Criminal Power: James Baldwin and the Law”
Baptism in the Merrimack
A reflective journey in verse through the countryside and the human spirit
Baptism in the Merrimack starts out in Lowell, Massachusetts, and wends its way back to the author's ancestral home in Rapidan, Virginia, along the Rapidan River. These are poems about places where nature and the individual spirit merge, the one flowing inevitably into the other. The concluding essay, The News from Kerouac's Lowell, is a meditation on Jack Kerouac's life and continuing presence in his hometown.
“In warm, moving, yet taut poems, Hilary Holladay takes us from Jack Kerouac's Merrimack River to her own Rapidan in Virginia. The distance is marked with sharply drawn raccoons, the ‘light aching’ of a throat at the beauties of the natural world, and a peaceful musing on both loss and love.”
- Linda Wagner-Martin, author of The Bell Jar: A Novel of the Fifties