“This is a ravishing first collection from a mature and unflinching voice (…) asserting our shared humanity in every word.”
—Betsy Andrews
“… poems that strike the heart with their quiet observations on love, loss, and the ever-present passage of time.”
—Sarah Ladipo Manyika
“… at once profoundly personal by experience, universal in its empathy, and created with exquisite gift and craft.”
—Alan Charles Kors
“An unforgettable poetry collection about family, fidelity, war, death, brain injury, migration, and even birds and dance.
—Bryan R. Monte
In these urbane, emotionally charged poems, international strategy consultant, prizewinning children’s author, and human rights advocate Hollis Kurman is fearless in confronting crucial issues of our time.
Whether she’s examining repercussions of war, migration, and personal history, or the joys of art and dance, there are few sociopolitical or cultural spaces that are not transformed by Kurman’s nimble craft and daring empathy. Her writing crosses borders and invites us to take a fresh and undaunted look at rites of passage, peril, and survival, always revealing “the surmise of light under doors.”
Elegant and visceral in equal measure, this much anticipated debut collection conjures gifts where they are hardest to find.
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Unlikely Skylight is published by Barrow Street Books New York
$18.00
ISBN: 9781962131100
Pre-orders available NOW at Barrow Street and Amazon
Available on June 15, 2025:
Itasca Books
Barrow Street
What is the antidote to pain, where the cure for loss? In the ever-absence of easy answers, as “we wonder aloud who would/speak for us, tell our story,” Hollis Kurman offers a rare kind of witness: a poetry spare and exacting as “bones, the miracle/of their quiet folding/and holding, protruding”—keenly observed and precisely wrought to inscribe our most vulnerable truths. This is a ravishing first collection from a mature and unflinching voice “taking inventory,” “blading through/canebrakes and undergrowth,” and asserting our shared humanity in every word.
—Betsy Andrews
I woke very early this morning, stole some quiet time and began the sunlight of Unlikely Skylight, sunlight indeed! These are poems that strike the heart with their quiet observations on love, loss, and the ever-present passage of time.
—Sarah Ladipo Manyika
Hollis Kurman’s poetry is at once profoundly personal by experience, universal in its empathy, and created with exquisite gift and craft. She expresses the deepest existential human moments—love, abandonment, joy, distance, pain, connection— in verse simultaneously taut and flowing. This collection introduces us to a singular, accomplished, and deeply moving poetic voice.
—Alan Charles Kors
Unlikely Skylight is an unforgettable poetry collection about family, fidelity, war, death, brain injury, migration, and even birds and dance. Set at museums, parties, hotels, the seaside, and in hospitals and clinics—in the United States, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Poland—the poems are engaging, provocative, and wide-ranging.
—Bryan R. Monte
Here are three of the many poems included in Unlikely Skylight. With thanks to Atlanta Review (Missing), Scoundrel Time (Omelet Nation) and Lilith Magazine (Just Girls) where these poems first appeared.
Note: Reading poetry on digital devices can be tricky as the poems’ shape and spacing may not appear correctly on small screens.
It took her about three weeks not to hear them.
The songbirds had not followed her and her boxes
those few short miles down the mountain, not even the
oddly heavy box with her beloved in it, no longer whistling.
How much is a paved driveway worth in morning birdcalls? One
cardinal coloratura in its siren flash across low sky or the Morse coding
of mourning doves? She missed the insistence of tufted titmice as she set
the breakfast table and even the cartoon cackle and drum of the woodpeckers.
Without realizing, they had come to think of these birds as their birds, these
calls as theirs. He had his stones and she her blooms. But birdsong they
shared. As he faded, the coos and chirps made for good conversation
or distraction, American goldfinches squeaking sun into the quiet.
Only sparrows now, she said, not wanting to suggest ordinariness
or ingratitude for this perfect place with its mountain breezes.
Being this close to town is a mixed blessing, and when he
finally stopped whistling, he took the birdsong with him.
We were two young girls with backyard passages so we
wouldn’t have to go around the block and knock, wouldn’t
alert our brothers or interfere with their one-on-ones or alert
our parents making dinner, mine likely easy leftovers so our
working mom needn’t fuss, hers likely grit and greens working
their organoleptic magic in my mouth; at her house I watched their
ways for clues, whatever I could borrow or pocket, studying her ways
of belying her stature, a wisp of iron, cool little ocelot, afraid of
no one, all protection and sinewy strength at my side, no one
color barred; oh and next to her taut limbs mine of no color
felt futureless and blank, though we shared skinny and felt
forever in friendship, would tiptoe around her father forever;
but even before our friendship faded I saw how she squirmed but
still sat by my grandfather and relived his tales of escape, still
listened to his ocean crossings, radiating a respect as she listened
that the other girls just couldn’t muster, and I knew then that
home was near, that we’d laugh our way out of danger all the way home.
And a country slaps over on itself
as the fatted pan heats,
half bubbling
half spitting
its middle oozing,
the diced and julienned
facing off, transition
quick as a
fork stir,
states of matter in
spatula, liquid maybe to solid no
as we flip and season,
bits hissing
where they fry, defy
laws, molecules slowing despite
the flames, weeping
edges harden,
stop short
between fluff and burn, the test,
they say, of any true
chef, of
greatness.
Hollis was born in New York City and educated at the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service (MSFS).
In addition to her writing, Kurman has had a distinguished career as a management consultant advising major multinational companies in international growth strategy and innovation. She serves on the Human Rights Watch Global Advisory Council for Women’s Rights and the Fulbright Commission NL Board. She is Chairperson of the Ivy Circle, has served on the Board of Trustees of Save the Children Netherlands, and moderates literary and academic events.
Her poems have appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Atlanta Review (International Poetry Competition finalist), Barrow Street, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Lilith, Ocean State Review, Phoebe, Rattle, and elsewhere.
Kurman’s debut children’s picture book, Hello! (Otter-Barry Books) / Counting Kindness: Ten Ways to Welcome Refugee Children (Charlesbridge), is published in ten countries. The book is endorsed by Amnesty International, was nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal (UK) 2021 and the DC Library Association Three Stars Book Award, and won a Northern Lights Book Award. The second book in the counting series, Counting in Green: 10 Little Ways to Help Our Big Planet, launched internationally in 2023, with a third book anticipated in 2026.
She lives with her husband in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
