SPEED READING: Lions Like Us / Hollie Hardy
Lions Like Us
Hollie Hardy
Red Light Lit Press
Review by
Kathleen J. Woods
Welcome to Speed Reading, our fast, occasionally flippant, review column where we attempt to spread the love of a recent new release in a very short amount of time. We’ll take the time to find some incredible books, you spend your time reading some incredible books.
So, what’s Lion Likes Us about?
This tender, sensual collection of poems offers a detailed exploration of longing at its most delicate and ferocious. Divided into four parts, Lions Like Us first draws the reader into the intimate experience of desire’s thrills and terrors, gradually expanding from the beautiful risks demanded by loving one person to the courage and heartbreak of loving the world.
And, who’s the author?
Hollie Hardy.
What’s their deal?
Hollie Hardy is a poet, educator, editor, and literary arts organizer. She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University, and her first book, How to Take a Bullet And Other Survival Poems, won SFSU’s Annual Poetry Center Book Award in 2014. Now, here in 2024, Lions Like Us reflects a changed world. (As a slow writer myself, I find the gaps claimed for living, writing, and publishing so compelling!)
A single reason why you should read Lions Like Us?
If you’re caught in the thrall of new love or want to immerse yourself in a complex, steamy depiction of earth-opening romance, Lions Like Us is the poetry collection for you.
What are a couple more reasons to read Lions Like Us?
Lions Like Us opens with the poem “Elevator Pitch,” a poem with mirrored opening and ending lines: “Take me home.”
Hardy complicates the longing for a sense of “home” throughout this book, as our speaker (who we seem to follow across poems) yearns for a sense of contentment in safety in the arms of their beloved, but also in the world, or in their own sense of self.
That said, these poems aren’t content to choose between a longing for safety and a longing for the thrill of uncertainty, of a relationship in its most nascent, feral stages, when two people are more intertwined and inscrutable than ever. Love and its lovers are at turns calm as nesting birds and wild as the titular lions here, knit together and wrenched apart.
Take these lines from the poem “Ephemeral”: “We look into the eye of departure / Seeking lighthouse, seeking storm”
Hardy doesn’t offer a false, tidy linear trajectory of passion building into a sustained relationship. I found it thrilling to read the push and pull between the lovers and the challenges of preserving individual identity even while drowning a full-body want for another person.
From “Le Lengua de Cielo”: “My night jasmine sleeps in the daytime / with closed little fists of blooms / ready to burst into fragrance / at the slightest touch of desk / I want to find my way home to you / without losing myself in the journey”
Throughout the collection, we are invited into the tangible experience of tensions tightening and easing between our lovers, along with their melting into and retreating from each other and the outer world.
While I wasn’t always convinced of some of the later poems’ engagement with the nuances of pandemic and protest (perhaps my reading was clouded by my own memories!), I did find it striking that Hardy doesn’t refuse to explore how personal intimacy exists in the context of historic emergency.
And one of my absolute favorite elements: Hardy’s gorgeous descriptions of nature, and the feeling of embodiment that ties the human animal to the earth.
A favorite passage from Lions Like Us:
From “Unseen”:
I lay back in the grass
and let the sky slip over me
like a childhood
I remember how you wanted to be smaller
how you tried to fold yourself into a paper bird
tiny wings full of dark
If they wanted to
all the spiders of the world could band together
to eat all the humans of the world
And when they were done
we could be gone
and the spiders would still be hungry
