Holstad’s poetry … has received much praise. His work is described by one critic as “brassy and strong.” According to The Hawaii Review, “Holstad’s poetry is reminiscent of the Beat Movement and has a Whitmanish-Ferlinghetti street feel… Michael Bugeja from Writer’s Digest Magazine wrote, ‘I enjoy Holstad’s poems and appreciate their style.’ A prolific poet, Holstad has also found the time to get married, hold down a job as editor of TSI Publications in Los Angeles and study computer engineering at UCLA.

Holstad's PLACES has garnered several award nominations, including the Pulitzer Prize. The book combines two aspects of Holstad's style that previously existed separately. [He says that] the first half of the book tends to focus on physical places where I've been, where I've lived, had experiences in. The second half is some of the rougher, tougher beat-type stuff, and it tends to be more of a focus on emotional or mental places that I would have experienced over the past few years.

Holstad’s poetry explores places that often contain dark corners and negative emotions, but UCLA's Alex Papanicolopoulos noted that you can see and touch and feel and taste his poetry, so virtually anyone may be able to access and appreciate his poetry. His new book, Places, shows that he certainly knows how to play to his audience.

Scott Holstad is a hardworking poet whose [new] book, Places, has just been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry… Holstad’s poems are predominantly voice driven — and that voice is often filled with the anger of moral outrage. Poems such as “let’s give ourselves a round,” “this is what we are” and “just for kicks” express the poet’s disgust with his fellow American’s penchant for mindless violence and excess. But Holstad’s poems are just plain angry. In the poem “smoking,” the poet, having recently quit after ten years expresses a desire to “file [his] teeth / on your forehead.” Places, however, also announces some new directions for Holstad’s work — some poems reveal a quieter, more contemplative aspect of his voice… But this is not to say that Holstad has gone soft–not by any stretch of the imagination. These poems provide relief from a vision of the world which might otherwise prove too bleak for most readers… Ultimately, for Holstad, as for Bukowski, “The poem is the / crutch, the gun, the / good drink.” Need I say more?

…Overall a sense climbing towards tomorrow, even if today pushes you thru the industrial meat grinder for another countless day.

Scott C. Holstad: PLACES (S.C. Holstad, P.O. Box 17657, Beverly Hills, CA 90209-3657, USA)

Seit Jahren der nicht ganz einsame Poet alltaglicher Beobachtungen, personlicher Gefuhle und dokunmentiertem Zeitgeist. Sehr einfuhlsam, wenn such ausschlieBlich in Englisch.