Temporary Stasis by Lucy Holme Broken Sleep Books

In this brilliant debut pamphlet, Lucy Holme considers the personal and political, the intimate and universal, the meditative and mythic. Temporary Stasis is testament to Holme’s remarkable ability to balance, in the space of a single page, the intimate and the epic. This is a collection that will delight and impress, encourage and challenge, and should be the envy of every writer. These poems are magnificent in execution, with a deftness of language and sensibility that marks Holme’s work as masterfully crafted and wholly original.

PRAISE for Temporary Stasis:

This striking collection of poems is a compelling fusion of contrasting energies. It is at once meditative, lyrical and deeply political. But that’s the poet Lucy Holme for you, she’s a writer with a rare gift for holding impossible tensions and singing them into lucid, invaluable poems. Temporary Stasis is a haunting exploration of the feminine and the marine; woman and ocean mix and merge as Lucy Holme’s potent lines dive us toward a profound understanding of the acquamarine, and the powers and vulnerabilities of the feminine. 
— Grace Wells, The Church of the Love of the World

Lucy Holme’s Temporary Stasis has the potential of a moment when something is about to happen: some unleashing, or some potential wild rebellion. In a chapbook made up of short, vivid sequences, the stories of women are foregrounded, especially how girls and women are conditioned to be small, to take up little space, to serve, but the water that flows through many of these poems, the all-encompassing seas, offer other possibilities to the narrators. Some scenarios are disturbingly familiar, like poems that document the framing of women as mere objects to service some men. The book laments the banal limits of macho fantasy in poems like ‘Secret Closet’. Other poems contemplate women’s lives from the view of an older woman, like the speaker in ’Lane Swimming in the Club Natació’ who refuses to work out to get in shape but instead “to tally the years, with a heart made stronger”. Altogether, this collection offers an intriguing assortment of poems which critique the narrowness of roles set forth for girls. There is hope too however, as inspired by closeness with nature and especially water, older narrators remain on a quest for more nourishing and sensuous possibilities.
— Zoë Brigley, Hand & Skull

Broken Sleep Books