Marybeth Holleman’s newest book is the poetry collection tender gravity. She’s also author of nonfiction books including The Heart of the Sound and Among Wolves. Raised in North Carolina’s Smokies, she transplanted to Alaska's Chugach Mountains after falling head over heels for Prince William Sound two years before the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

tender gravity, Marybeth’s debut poetry collection, arrived into the world in August 2022. 

tender gravity charts a course of love, loss, and solace in time spent rooted in the more-than-human world. With praise poems echoing Mary Oliver, and with expansive inclusivity reminiscent of Walt Whitman, Marybeth draws us so close into her wild world that we, too, feel “that joy-sap rising.” 

In the company of humpbacks, ravens, moon jellies, and sphagnum, Holleman seeks consolations that serve as antidote to the otherwise intolerable grief and violence of the human world. ‘We want the vast / to cleanse transgressions we carry,’ she writes, and that desire illuminates these poems.
— Alison Hawthorne Deming

The poems in tender gravity are truly gems, beautifully honed to cast and reflect the inner and outer light of her subjects. Holleman's book is a remarkable treasure.
—Pattiann Rogers

 ‘Stand on your 52 / bones’ and allow these poems to call you into connection with the world. tender gravity expands the beautiful, necessary work of writers doing healing and challenging our disconnection from the nonhuman.
—Elizabeth Bradfield

As these poems move through a big Alaskan landscape and also bend in attention to grief, they seek and find temporary refuge ‘in the variations in / the beat of a heart.’ ‘Every wisdom slips away / as soon as I try to name it,’ Holleman says, but what slips also shimmers, caressed in Holleman’s keen attentions. tender gravity is a book of hunger, and of restoration.
—Tess Taylor