Poetry. "These poems aren't so much written as excavated, pulled from the deep ground of human grief, followed by the reclamation of a self who has unearthed every shard. Holaday Mason's language is stunning--it matches the hot pulse of her imagery; her losses(mother/brother/husband) remain immediate and searing as she sets them on the page; her vision redeems pain, as all excellent poetry should do, without softening it. THE WEAVER'S BODY astonishes as well as strengthening a reader. Don't miss it."--Holly Prado

"One is reminded of Dickinson--dashes, pauses, the breathless evocation of all that eludes linguistic definition. Rilke's shade also guides Mason's hand throughout this, her first full-length volume of poems. The poems here continually confirm a wise, sensuous maturity. Mason repeatedly reminds us of the ways our lives move always between great discipline and wild abandon."--Reed Wilson

"Here, 'in this weedy darkness' where Eros strikes no bargain between our Masters, love & death, truth & lies, between the past & future, or between the body & the mind's foreordained understanding of what's at stake, Holaday Mason, in THE WEAVER'S BODY creates that 'insolent beauty' of a new story woven and unwoven out of blood song. What begins in equations of the natural world's conversing with what is lost and found, ends at the beginning of 'who we become when we remember forever.' So, the senses, hearing and sight, become figures of allegory and become the remaking of time as measured by the body where Holaday, 'freed... from the barracks of identity, ' creates a marvelous synesthetic fourth dimension. This is how poetry's visceral joy comes in quietly to reconcile what we have known all along, on the other side of surprise."--Elena Karina Byrne