2025 read #43: The Pressure of All That Light by Holly Painter.

The Pressure of All That Light by Holly Painter

71 pages

Published 2022

Read May 21

Rating: 4 out of 5

I tend to orbit the same few topics in the poetry I read, as well as what I write: queerness, nature, childhood trauma, and the American Midwest, plus speculative elements that expand upon or elucidate those themes. This collection checks all of my boxes except for the speculative elements. Naturally, I adore it.

Painter excels at the mythological primacy that shapes childhood, in all its petty glories and vast heartbreaks. “We slice a worm with a spade / and the dead fall out / but we are small gods: / we’ve made another worm,” she writes in “Lone Pine Cemetery.” She also has a deft hand with the confusion of new adulthood, spinning archetypal images of queer college life with its questions and experiments gone wrong.