'Capacity is a volume with two chambers. The first, 'Modern Woman Sonnets', comprises twenty-six wild and precise love poems, which can be traced back to those of the Renaissance original Louise Labé. These sonnets are versions, hardly, or echoes, clearly, of Labé’s, and perpetuate the internal logic of her love. The book’s second part, 'Demonics', contains poems of a dark and numinous music, contemplating myriad forms of possession. The lyrical, transformative structures of Holt's poems provide ‘a field of force’ for the daimonic to play, within the self and without. The darting humour and lucid astonishments of her previous work can be found here in Capacity.' (Publication summary)
'These days, poetry is primarily a visual experience. So claims the American poet and theorist Cole Swensen, whose essay ‘To Writewithize’ argues for a new definition of ekphrasis. Traditionally understood to be writing about visual art, ekphrasis typically has a poet stand across from a painting or sculpture, in a kind of face-off, and write about it. To ‘writewithize’, however, is to take a different approach: this is not writing made about art but made with it. This is writing that, in Swensen’s words, ‘lives with the work and its disturbances’. Two new Vagabond releases by Bella Li and LK Holt are doing ekphrastic and intertextual work that is exquisitely disturbing. These are moody books of allusion and visual play by two of Melbourne’s most brilliant poets.' (Introduction)
'These days, poetry is primarily a visual experience. So claims the American poet and theorist Cole Swensen, whose essay ‘To Writewithize’ argues for a new definition of ekphrasis. Traditionally understood to be writing about visual art, ekphrasis typically has a poet stand across from a painting or sculpture, in a kind of face-off, and write about it. To ‘writewithize’, however, is to take a different approach: this is not writing made about art but made with it. This is writing that, in Swensen’s words, ‘lives with the work and its disturbances’. Two new Vagabond releases by Bella Li and LK Holt are doing ekphrastic and intertextual work that is exquisitely disturbing. These are moody books of allusion and visual play by two of Melbourne’s most brilliant poets.' (Introduction)
