Requisite
Tanya Holtland
978-1-913007-05-8 · 112 pages · 153 × 234 mm · Sep. 2020
In a time of crisis, and with a lifetime of geography residing within, the punctuated spaces of Requisite reveal the interior narratives of a collapsing world. We learn resistance: To not dismiss ourselves from the story unfolding before us. Instead, we must follow the quietness that encompasses—that has been seeking our attention all along—as we acknowledge the ecology of events, within and without, that we must reconcile to survive.
Watch the Requisite launch event on Instagram.
Tanya Holtland is a writer from Los Angeles, and a graduate of San Francisco State University’s English and Creative Writing MA program. Of Dutch-Indonesian descent, she is currently working on a memoir surrounding migration, ecology, loss, and healing.
Praise & Reviews
Smart and emotionally complex, these poems create a beautiful meditation moving us around our changing earth with elegance and precision—an intellectual nod to our current times.
— Kelli Russell Agodon
Here is a poet who knows something secret, and it is with profound, urgent acuity that she reminds us how ‘the curve of the earth / comes to meet you, / to the smallest / portions of the soul.’
— Jennifer S. Cheng
Within the manifest crisis of ecological collapse, she wanders with awareness, sensitive to the resources that enhance ‘the invisible faculty.’ The spare, sinuous song of this poetry nurtures possibility amid peril, for Holtland’s probing, restorative attention is never passive, but instead moves with the vitality of necessity.
— Elizabeth Robinson
There is such a wonderful, careful complexity to Holtland’s lyric meditations, setting pause against pause.
— Rob Mclennan
Misc.
- ‘The Earth’s Story is Also Our Story’ — Tanya reading from Requisite
- Cover artwork by Lorna Simpson