Poet Joan Houlihan came to Perlman Hall on Wednesday to read from her latest work, 2009's The Us. A Massachusetts native, Houlihan acquired both her master's and bachelor's degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Besides her published works, including 2006's The Mending Worm, her work has appeared in an abundance of articles and literary magazines such as Gulf Coast, the Harvard Review, the Gettysburg Review, Poetry International, Fulcrum, Passages North and the Boston Review. She is the winner of the 2005 Green Rose Prize in Poetry.

The Us contains an immense plethora of detailed imagery, raw emotion and seemingly ancient diction. Upon arriving, Houlihan, in a soft-spoken manner that commanded the attention of the audience, explained the characters of her recent poetry. The Us consists of "Father," who is the leader of Us; "Gwen," who is the mother; "I," the son; "Grey," the second son; "Sen," the wise female elder; and "Greb," the one of the Us who is sly.

The Us are primal people, driven by their need for food, water and survival and the bonds faced by those needs. The Us function as a working whole and strive for their needs as a group, not as individuals. As put simply by the author, "Without the other members, they don't exist. [It is] a step in evolution in consciousness of ‘us.' The voice is in the collective because the characters perceive themselves as one." The Us, at odds with a more powerful culture, named "them," "must live outside civilization in order to be free and fully alive."

A rare form of naturalistic observation stems throughout Houlihan's work, dissimilar to the more prevalent use of the poem as a "confessional." Houlihan stated that she had never been comfortable with that part of poetry and, for her, poetry was more of a medium to use voices that you wouldn't hear on a day-to-day basis. The audience listened attentively as she read from her poem, "From Dirt, a Stir." "From dirt, a stir put forth its mix, smell/ of weed and green-held bud, deep cups/ sweet and sharp. Warmer started day./ Sun lay wider where us walked."

When I inquired about the inspirations behind her recent work, Houlihan said that it was born out of a mistake. "I misread my own writing. I was writing about a group of people sailing to an island [referring to them] as ‘we.' I mistook the ‘we' I had written for ‘us,' and then I had this sense that an ‘us' [existed], and I went with that route." Houlihan said that after this mistake she began doing "backwards" research, looking into more indigenous cultures that refer to themselves as an ‘us,' the Us being a collective society.

During her research and writing for the collection, which she mostly completed over the course of six to seven months, Houlihan said she would simply wake up and write a poem a day. Throughout her writing process, Houlihan paid specific attention to origin of speech and kept her specific use of language consistent. Due to the nature of her writing, the author said that her poems are not always easily translated at first glance. Therefore, she includes marginalia to clear up any questions about vocabulary and plot points.

Houlihan's animalistic, metaphoric words captivated the already attentive audience this past Wednesday. "Him would leave us nothing but a god. Beside the bed, us hailed and poked his length with sticks." The sensory world that was created in front of my eyes was every bit as graceful, controlled and fluid as her introduction upon arriving. Usually I find myself drawn to dark, personal poems stemming from periods of insanity from writers such as Sylvia Plath. However, I was particularly attracted to the non-explicitness of Houlihan's work that still found a depth through descriptions. By the end of her reading, I was curious how the author would be able to separate herself after being immersed in the world of The Us. Houlihan said that it was difficult to leave the world of her parallel universe. Her use of consciousness between the collective cultures caused me to question the role of an individual in society, and how transformative a world of the "Us" would be in our current individual-driven nation.

As far as her next poetry collection goes, Houlihan will soon release a new book, Ay (pronounced "I"). Until its release, I will eagerly await to return to the created world with one collective consciousness that Houlihan has made uniquely her own.