Bill Holm

Growing up, Bill Holm knew what failure was: "to die in Minneota.” But after returning to his hometown ("a very small dot on an ocean of grass”) after 20 years’ absence, he wasn’t so sure. Finding pleasure in the customs and characters of small-town life, in The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth he writes with affection about the town elders, seen by those in the outside world as misfits and losers. "They taught me what to value, what to ignore, what to embrace, and what to resist.” In his trek through the heartland, Holm covers a satisfyingly wide emotional terrain, from scandalous affairs in the 1950s to his aunt’s touching attempts to transcend poverty with perfume and movie-star airs.

The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth

William Reid

Bill Reid

A Dialogue on Craftsmanship and Aesthetics

Indian Art of the Northwest Coast

This book is a foundational reference on northern Northwest Coast Native art. Through his careful studies, Bill Holm described this visual language using new terminology that has become part of the established vocabulary that allows us to talk about works like these and understand changes in style both through time and between individual artists' styles.

An Analysis of Form

Northwest Coast Indian Art

A Midwesterner contemplates the view of America from a remote Icelandic village: "A pleasure to read and ponder." — Booklist (starred review) A Minnesotan of Icelandic ancestry, Bill Holm had traveled all over the world, gathering material for a number of rich and memorable books. Then he decided to journey to the land his family had long ago left behind for the United States, and moved into a town with one general store in a nation of a few hundred thousand people. This book recounts his time at Brimnes, his fisherman's cottage on the shore of a creek in northern Iceland. There, he embarks on a very different life in a very different world, and from thousands of miles away, considers the fate of America—"my home, my citizenship, my burden"—in these provocative, compelling essays. "A master storyteller." — Los Angeles Times "Bill Holm's life in [this] place of spare beauty will make readers wish they had a Brimnes where they could restore their souls." — Pioneer Press (St. Paul)

An American in Iceland

The Windows of Brimnes

Studies the significance of islands and discusses whether they encourage eccentricity and grandeur in human beings.

Travels Real and Imaginary

Eccentric Islands

Arranged by letter of the alphabet, with at least one entry per letter, these short pieces capture the variety of daily life in contemporary China. Topics include dumpling making, bound feet, Chinglish, night soil, and banking.

An Alphabet of China Essays

Coming Home Crazy

FACES OF CHRISTMAS PAST is an engaging, middle-aged look at the perils of Christmas, our own self-imposed burdens of ritual duty (like the newsy Christmas Xerox), and the more unsettling fact that successive Christmases, more even than New Year's, mark the passing of our life from childhood to death. "Old Christmas card photos show us how we've aged," says author Bill Holm, "reminding us that, though time may curve in Einstein's physics, in our small life it is a straight line to white hair and bifocals."

Faces of Christmas Past

To say that Boxelder Bug Variations is an unusual book is indeed an understatement. It is unusual in its subject, in its range of forms, and most of all, in the incredible energy and whimsy of its imagination. We move from poems to meditations, from a conversation with an entomologist to an essay on clavichords and fugues, from musical scores to fables, haiku, and even a bit of family and local history. In short, if it's hard to pin down exactly what this book is, it's not at all hard to be delighted, charmed, even provoked by it. What Holm ultimately reminds us has to do with overlooking the so called insignificant things, and in so doing overlooking the power of imagination itself. For it is imagination that is the real subject of this book. For those of us who have not forgotten that small and unpretentious things are the most durable and surprising subjects for Art, this book is a rare, wonderful, and most welcome gift. -- From Independent Publisher.

A Meditation on an Idea in Language and Music

Boxelder Bug Variations

Bob Firth

Landscape of Ghosts

The author travels to a small fishing cirlce in Iceland and reflects on the United States.

"At the age of ten, growing up on the prairie in southwest Minnesota, Bill Holm began assembling "The Collected Poems of Wm. J. Holm, 1953." Animated by youthful ambition and a strong affinity for music, langauge, and the mystery of life, the boy would later become known as "the sage of Minnesota."" "Including nearly a hundred new, previously unpublished poems, along with poems selected from his previous collections, The Chain Letter of the Soul paints a portrait of a man of great heart, broad vision, and startling prescience. At once intimate and profoundly universal, approachable yet richly philosophical, these poems represent a final gift to "whatever future will come."" --Book Jacket.

Bill Holm

Books

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