Shadow-feast is a chronicle of dying--the awareness, denial, pain, and hope surrounding incurable illness, as well as the aftermath of grief as told from three points of view: Hers, His, and Theirs (the couple). The collection as a whole is a kagezen, or shadow-feast, a traditional Japanese meal offered to the dead. However, here it is set out not for an absent beloved, but for the reader. Praise for Joan Houlihan: "Houlihan wields language like a weapon, carving out lines that are stingingly precise." --Ellen Wehle, West Branch   "...original, energetic language that confronts various shades of darkness and captures the oddness of being alive." --Pamela Alexander, FIELD   "...takes acuity and intensity of feeling not as its ends, but points of departure."  --Michael Snediker, Pleiades   "These poems touch on raw power in their invention..."  --Keith Leonard, Indiana Review   " ... a rough-hewn sensuality that is seductive and refreshing in this the digital age." --Sawnie Morris, Boston Review   "...explores facets of contemporary loss and decline, letting language reveal what is deepest. ...." --Tayve Neese, Web Del Sol Review of Books   ". . .  shines  with a serious lyrical burnish in which image and truth alike take on the luster of icons . ." --Chad Parmenter, American Book Review    " Adventuresome collections of contemporary poetry, take note: here's a writer to watch, so be in the forefront and purchase now." --Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal "Shadow-feast is a tour-de-force sheared of excess, breathtaking in its leaps, and thrilling in its sonic resonances." --Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, Los Angeles Times "Critics compare her to Emily Dickinson and I think I know why. They each distill language and feeling to a crystalline state that never tells a lie. Reading Houlihan reminds me of why I first loved poetry." --Grace Caliveri, Washington Independent Review of Books "To explore at length the painful process of grief and the awareness that consolation and recovery might actually not be possible, that loss is always with us, is the inescapable truth of Shadow-feast."--Eve F.W. Linn, Poetry International "Time came in and stranded us here, writes Joan Houlihan in the third poem of her new book, Shadow-feast, after the Japanese Kage-zen, "a repast...offered to the spirit of the absent one loved." The poems chronicle the mourner's (Hers, section one) reflections of the dying and death of her husband; the empathetic raising of the husband's replies (His, section two); and (Theirs, section three) a sequence driven by third-person narrative being resolved intermittently back into the voice of the mourning wife." --Michael Steffen, Boston Area Small Press & Poetry Scene “Shadow-Feast, the deft, wrenching title of this collection, inspired by the enigmatic internationalist writer Lafcadio Hearn, provides one of many keys to experiencing the meticulous linguistic ‘ceremony’ and rich ‘repast’ of Joan Houlihan’s singular work. These are urgent and fiercely incorruptible lyrics where the unsettlingly oblique and surreal is juxtaposed against moments of lucid and visceral anguish: ‘We had married ourselves to a trance.’ And ‘When they came for him full-dressed / and somber, they lifted a body made lighter / by suffering, laid it into the rubber bag / then zipped it to the top of his head.’ Who writes with this kind of prescient confidence and startling lyricism besides Joan Houlihan? Emily Dickinson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Harryette Mullen come to mind.” (Peter Covino) “‘COME TO THE WAIT and the sea/flexes sleek in the sun,’ Joan Houlihan tells us, and we sense the subtle disruption of our expectations of normalcy. We’ve entered an alternative sense of time, one lived daily by those facing an encroaching death, and we find ourselves intuitively responding to how the coming of a death offers this constancy: all will become foreign, all hopes and self-protective devices will be violated.” (Rusty Morrison) The award-winning author of five books of poetry, Joan Houlihan serves on the faculty of Lesley University's Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is Professor of Practice in Poetry at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Houlihan founded and directs the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference. She lives outside of Boston. From Shadow-feast: Uncatchable breaths, motion that descended Like a shadow's trail on their window Folded into a single desire Time's essence, elusive and fleeting Cast over mountains, sun's flicker couldn't pierce Clouds obscured the bare sky's view Privacy's chill revealed a man, his window framing No movement, only New England birch, bare limbs in waning light