SLIP

Overview

Inventive and dynamic, Nicole Callihan’s fourth poetry collection, SLIP, navigates midlife with stick in hand and tongue in cheek. As Ellen Bass writes, Callihan “turns recurrent obsessions like children, husband, mother, laundry, time, art, and body into poems of elastic syntax and shapes––psalms, prose, lyric, narrative.” Whether looking back at her girlhood, counting out almonds, or singing herself (yet another) birthday song, Callihan’s luminous linguistics send us on an expansive journey. Sometimes dreamlike, sometimes raucous, these poems teach us how much can be held in a life and on the page.

Author Biography

Nicole Callihan was born in Hickory, North Carolina and raised in the Carolinas, South Dakota, and finally, Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 1995, she received a BA from University of Oklahoma and went on to study at New York University where she received an MA in Poetry (1998) and an MFA in Fiction (2005). Callihan is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently, chigger ridge, selected by Sandra Lim for the Tenth Gate Prize which honors a midcareer poet for a “sustained dedication to developing a unique poetics.” (The Word Works, 2024).