Joan Houlihan is an American poet. She is the author of five books, most recently Shadow-feast (Four Way Books, 2018), described by the Los Angeles Review as "...a tour de force sheared of excess, breathtaking in its leaps, and thrilling in its sonic resonances." Her other books include The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009) described by Lucie Brock-Broido as: "...like nothing I have ever read or seen. These poems are just extraordinary: wildly hewn, classically construed and skewed by an imagined lexicon.… In a voice that is elemental, ancient, animistic, pre-lingual even, the speaker manages, with nothing short of magic, to communicate… in a language both syntactically inventive and radically simple"; Ay (Tupelo Press, 2014), the sequel to The Us, described by Ilya Kaminsky as "breathtakingly inventive and yet deeply humane...a narrative and song at once; it is talismanic"; The Mending Worm (New Issues Press), winner of the 2005 Green Rose Prize in Poetry, and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays (Del Sol Press, 2003; Room 204 Press, 2009) which includes her series of essays on contemporary American poetry called The Boston Comment. The essays drew a great deal of attention for their criticism of both traditional and what she termed "post-avant" poetry, occasioning responses from Fred Moramarco of Poetry International and a wide range of letters from the poetry community both favorable and critical