A Raw Review of Danielle Holian’s Recent Self-Published Poetry Works - ‘Growing Pains’
- 11 hours ago
- 2 min read
There is a particular kind of courage involved in turning a private wound into a public document. Danielle Holian has done exactly that with Growing Pains, her fourth collection and arguably her most unsparing.
Structured in five sections — Honeymoon, Handcuffs, Hangover, Hindsight, and Homecoming — the book charts the full emotional cartography of a relationship spanning half a decade: its intoxicating beginnings, the slow erosion that followed, and the long, deliberate work of reclaiming a self that had been quietly dismantled.
Honeymoon opens with all the warmth that title implies. Poems like ‘The Last Day of Summer’ and ‘Invisible String’ carry a tender, unhurried quality — the sensation of two people finding each other for the first time and choosing to believe in it. Holian writes early love with a precision that makes the later sections land harder. She establishes not naivety but genuine feeling, which means the reader understands, in full, what is being lost when the collection shifts register.
And it does shift, sharply. Handcuffs is where the collection finds its teeth. Holian does not reach for abstraction when confronting control; she reaches for the particular and the embodied. In ‘First Day In,’ the disorientation of moving into a shared space that never quite becomes shared is rendered through sound and texture — a speaker roaring from another room, walls that ‘remembered something wild.’ The physical world in these poems is not decorative; it is the site of the speaker’s disappearance. ‘Session,’ one of the collection’s most unsettling pieces, unfolds inside a counsellor’s office where gaslighting operates in real time: ‘I watched him charm the room / watched the counsellor nod / watched my reality tilt / like a crooked painting no one bothered to straighten.’ It is a quietly devastating portrait of how abuse performs respectability.
Hangover extends this into exhaustion and dissociation, before Hindsight brings the clarity that grief, with enough distance, eventually allows. ‘The Good Person’ is a standout — an extended meditation on the asymmetry between a speaker for whom decency required no rehearsal, and a partner for whom it was always theatre. It is sharp without being shrill, analytical without losing its emotional ground.
Homecoming earns its title. The recovery poems do not oversell transformation; they document small acts of reclamation — returning to friends, learning to trust warmth without bracing for the catch, recognising that ‘the partner I choose / is a quiet declaration / of what I believe I deserve.’ Holian closes the collection not with triumph but with something more durable: the knowledge that the self, however diminished, remained.
Growing Pains is not a comfortable read. It is not meant to be. But it is a deeply honest one, and in that honesty — precise, unflinching, and ultimately compassionate toward its own speaker — it will find its audience without difficulty.
Rating: ★★★★☆
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