Even Goddesses Need Smoke Breaks, by Ryan E. Holman

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features. …every now and then even goddesses need smoke breaks. —from “Taking Measure” Even Goddesses Need Smoke Breaks examines different expressions of femininity in poetry. Goddesses and witches are the height of social aspects of femininity and are nonetheless cast outside of society—goddesses, because they are thought to embody a quality so completely as to be divine; witches, because they are often messing with forces that people don’t want to understand or simply “don’t fit.” Drawn from the very “unladylike” act of smoking and the ways in which that idea intersects with the burnt offerings to deities in ages past, the fifteen poems in Even Goddesses Need Smoke Breaks shed light on the transformation of ordinary outcasts into extraordinary storytellers. Ryan E. Holman has had work appearing in various publications and juried venues since the mid-2000s. She is the 2023 first-prize winner of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society’s annual poetry contest, after taking third prize in that contest in 2016 and 2021, and was invited four times to read in the Takoma Park Arts Poetry Reading Series (formerly Third Thursday). She has moved inland to higher ground, but still calls the mid-Atlantic home and enjoys writing about mundane and fantastic life through the lens of the elements.