Praise for
Fitzroy North 3068
Yvette Holt’s metaphors are spellbinding: a book of stone in peach truths and September honeycomb, all footstep memory – no compass required, where the pages read you. Join the poet ankled by mangroves in herstory, then converse with galaxies as lighthouse keepers receive tangelo gifts. Melding language and spirit, Yvette Henry Holt has risen to the celestial soul-dance that is Fitzroy North 3068.
–Anna Jacobson
Fitzroy North 3068 opens with a provocation: Can you keep a secret? Because this collection heaves with them — confessional in the truest sense. Yvette Henry Holt’s poems traverse a psychic and geographic cartography from Inala to Footscray, Athens to London. A “proud aboriginal indigenous native black sovereign woman of colour” whose pronouns are “me /myself /and I”, Holt writes through memory, identity, and matrilineal inheritance, conversing with ghosts, ancestors, poets, muses, and the archetypal inhabitants of her unconscious mind. Erotic, spiritual, irreverent, and unflinchingly intelligent, Yvette teases the reader by concealing as much as it reveals. I dare you to take your place on the chaise lounge of Holt’s analytic poetry and read this book as it “reads you” back.
–Michele Seminara