Now available for the first time in English, with 10 new poems.​
​ISBN: 978-1-61976-244-2 (13 digit)
Publication Date: 2023
paperback 98 pages

Forthcoming from Aqueduct Press:
​
Numinous Stones

​From Elgin Award winning author Holly Lyn Walrath, a haunting collection of poetry about grief and the sacred that digs deep beyond a fairytale world into the grave. Told in the circular pantoum form, Numinous Stones is a poetic graveyard littered with horror—from sentient scarecrows to silent skeletons to scorched sacred spaces. As each line repeats, new meaning gleams like bones unearthed in a shattered realm of monsters, dark forests, and dusty ghosts.

Now Available from Aqueduct Press

​“Walrath poetically constructs tombstones (what is poetry if not construction?) imbued with a sacred, powerful, and majestic presence that both attracts and terrifies. They are sacred tombstones that serve the poet, and we will see this in the reading of her texts to celebrate, mourn, cry out, and, finally, accept her father’s death…. The collected poems constitute a journey, a slow path that we could also define as a slow coming to consciousness. A becoming aware of a pain to be understood and experienced to be, finally, accepted.”  —From the original Introduction by Alex Tonelli in Numinose Lapidi

“A rich and layered collection of pantoums, a difficult form to begin with, that taps into mythic, albeit nightmarish, images, twisting and weaving them into dense, multi-layered gems. Walrath is a skilled practitioner at poetry, and fans of horror poetry will thoroughly enjoyed her newest collection, Numinous Stones.” –Joshua Gage, Cemetery Dance

"​The book is composed entirely of pantoums, a circular form adapted from traditional Malaysian poetry in which the second and fourth lines of each quatrain are also the first and third of the next. The repetition lends itself to slow developments and cycles, a good choice for the subject matter of death and grief, but also a key element in producing the impression of the book as a graveyard full of moveable headstones. By highlighting the line as a moveable element of composition through a form that repeats and reconfigures whole lines, the pantoums of Numinous Stones construct themselves as things that are as mobile as the lines, placed in their locations in the book with meticulous intention, but also as something that the reader can pick up and move as they read." —Tristan Beiter, Strange Horizons