Author(s): Sarah Holland-Batt

Poetry

Spanning poems written in the United States, Central America, Europe, and Australia, The Hazards is a dazzling and inventive collection. Opening with a vision of a leveret's agonizing death by myxomatosis and closing with a lover disappearing into dangerous waters, Holland-Batt reflects a predatory world rife with hazards, both real and imagined. Her cosmopolitan poems careen through diverse geographical territory--from haunted postcolonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua, the still Danish interiors of Hammershøi and the serial killer stalking Long Island Sound--and engage everywhere with questions of violence and loss, erasure, and extinction. Charged with Holland-Batt's mercurial imagination and swift lyricism, this unsettling and darkly intelligent collection inhabits an uncertain world with a questioning eye and clear mind, unafraid to veer "straight into turbulence."