The Press of All That Light

By Holly Painter

Holly Painter’s third collection charts a course through the tender friendships and lonely queer crushes of childhood and adolescence in Midwestern America and on to the dizzying freedoms of California and the disorientation of love and heartache in New Zealand. Energetic and intimate, these poems blend the personal and the pastoral in their exploration of how we arrive at ourselves.

Holly Painter is the author of Excerpts from a Natural History (Titus, 2015) and My Pet Sounds Off: Translating the Beach Boys (Finishing Line, 2020). Her poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the U.K., Singapore, and China. Born in Michigan, she lives with her wife and two children in Vermont, where she teaches literature and writing at the University of Vermont.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebel Satori Press
• Release date: Oct 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781608642236

Holly Painter

Holly Painter is the author of Excerpts from a Natural History (Titus, 2015) and My Pet Sounds Off: Translating the Beach Boys (Finishing Line, 2020). Her poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the U.K., Singapore, and China. Born in Michigan, she lives with her wife and two children in Vermont, where she teaches literature and writing at the University of Vermont.

Book preview

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The pressure of all that light

Holly Painter

Rebel Satori Press

New Orleans

Published in the United States of America by

Rebel Satori Press

www.rebelsatoripress.com

Copyright © 2022 by Holly Painter

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60864-210-6

ebook ISBN: 978-1-60864-223-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022942249

For Emily Beam, my throughline and my love

Contents

Auto Pilot

Peaches

The Strait

Shedd Aquarium

Assembly

Eight

Lone Pine Cemetery

Please don’t hurt me

Field Trip

Feed Me

Padiddle

They tell me I am wicked and I believe them

To San Francisco with Paul

Apologetics of a College Freshman

Sonoran Song

Venice Beach

The only shame

The New Neighborhood

The Man She Wants

Alternate Timeline

The San Francisco Self-Examiner

Save Our Souls

When you tire of your homeland

Shipwrecked, I Arrive

Dandelion

Her Blue Moons

We Get On

Otago

The day will be beautiful

Comfortable Grunge

Telephones

The way it felt to be so warm

Her Teeth

Canterbury Plains

Toilet Stop #4

Boys on the Beach

When You Transition Without Me

Winter Sun

Save Radio New Zealand

Picton’s Morning Crust

Another list of sorrows projected onto the landscape

Uretiti

Acknowledgments

Michigan

Auto Pilot

Instrument panel / Lite Brite code

Wild blue yonder / dead end road

Biplane wings / ear fuzz flaps

Ejection seat / my mama’s lap

Peaches

Mom? What’s a sex change?

The wooden spoon slows in the pot.

Hissing flecks of tomato soup

fling themselves at my mother’s hand.

Where did you hear that?

I’m returning from the pantry with peaches,

sunshine slices floating in a sea of syrup

inside the aluminum can.

At camp. Some kids said I should get a sex change.

My mother twists a knob beside the burner.

The glowing spiral fades quickly to gray

and appears cool.

A sex change is when a man becomes a woman. Or vice-versa.

I pick at the peach can label

with a close-bitten