Synopses & Reviews
Each of the 52 poems in Andrea Hollander’s And Now, Nowhere But Here, her sixth full-length collection, focuses on “an appreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible,” to quote Joseph Conrad from Heart of Darkness. But these autobiographical poems are not dark. Instead, they explore threshold moments from Hollander’s New Jersey childhood after her family’s departure from the military; her young adult years and accompanying struggles to understand how to engage with men; her long marriage spent in the Arkansas Ozark woods and its unexpected end; and her subsequent love affair with Portland, Oregon, where she settled after her divorce in 2011 and where she continues to thrive.
Review
"Hollander's impeccable conversational diction does just what a poem should do; it raises the hairs on the nape of your neck."
Maxine Kumin, US Poet Laureate, 1981-1982
Review
"Andrea Hollander knows what to hold back as she lets us in. And so we willingly bring ourselves into her subtly registered emotional world. There's a lovely blend of qualities-an unsparing eye, and a heart that humanizes what that eye sees."
Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2001
Review
"Some days, I think that hope is such a long way away, and then I read a poet like this-and life is in full gear."
Grace Cavalieri, Poet Laureate of Maryland, 2019
Review
"I wish that other people would write about personal experience the way Hollander does: there's so much wisdom and depth in her poems that I'm forced more deeply into my own life, and I emerge knowing things I didn't know, or didn't know I knew."
Martha Collins, William Carlos Williams Award, 2022
About the Author
Andrea Hollander moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2011, after living for more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she was innkeeper of a bed and breakfast for fifteen years and Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College for twenty-two. Her fifth full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Book Fest; her fourth was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her first won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays appear in anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, including a feature in The New York Times Magazine. Other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and literary nonfiction) and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2017 she initiated The Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she conducted in her home and now via Zoom.