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Tanya Holtland
she/her
Poet, Writer
Tanya Holtland is a poet and writer. She is author of the chapbook Inner River (Drop Leaf Press, 2016). Her poetry collection Requisite (Platypus Press, 2020), a meditation on climate, spirituality, and the future, was a finalist for the Broken River Prize and nominated for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Her nonfiction, lyric essays, and other works appear in Poetry Northwest, The Offing, EcoTheo Review, The Rupture, The Wire’s Dream, Mary: A Journal of New Writing, and elsewhere. A graduate of San Francisco State University’s English and Creative Writing MA program, she was also an artist-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford where she authored the libretto Fated, a collaboration with composer Daniela Candillari.
A Los Angeles native of the Dutch-Indonesian diaspora, but mixed South-East Asian and European descent, she grew up between New York, California, and Utah, and currently makes a home in Seattle, Washington.
About Their Work:
"We are not separate," Tanya articulates in the preface to her book, Requited. "Healing what is severed between the earth and us begins with a willingness to look." And these poems look into that gap, that disconnect of the intellect imagining the self as something apart from or above the natural world, look heartbreakingly into the spiritual depravity that results from "the violence of fracking, plastic in soil, oceans, and the bellies of animals, child encampments, and all manner of human rights abuses and atrocities that accumulate." We can find her there in these poems struggling to look, to witness, to get "comfortable with uncertainty," to "trace the lines of the universe/on the back of a leaf/whose children/will never know boredom." This is a spiritual practice, to peer in and simultaneously conjure "what we cannot see" -- the self as an integral part of the cosmos, living and breathing the ecology along the banks of the Duwamish, because "what we know/isn't known/till it's in the body/emerging as irreconcilable/feeling"
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Website(s):
Checkout her website at tanyaholtland.com
Books (for purchase):
Requisite (Platypus Press, 2020)
Online Work:
Find a full list of Tanya’s publications
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