NOTIFICATIONS ON
Winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House
Out January 26, 2027
Emily Holland’s urgent debut collection, Notifications On, interrogates fluctuations of lesbian desire across physical and digital landscapes. Against the backdrop of climate collapse, these places and platforms become sites of wanting, embodying locations where the speaker attempts to make their yearning—and their queerness—legible. Social media bots, rural convenience stores, internet memes, sites of remembrance, and online chat rooms all become spaces that refract the speaker’s sense of self and interrupt the flow of their desire.
In turns that resist forward narrative movement, Notifications On revisits moments of anxiety, pleasure, pain, and love; through them all, the speaker tells us exactly what they are “afraid to put into words.”
Advance Praise for Notifications On
Well, damn, this book fucks. Notifications On by Emily Holland is one hell of a debut: sexy, unflinching, witty, & intimate. The poems in this collection ask not only what & who do we want, but how can we possibly disentangle our desires from those of others? & how can we then communicate those wants, outside of language, beyond the body, & in moments of intrusion? If queer yearning & regret were a book, it would be called Notifications On.
— Mac Crane, author of A Sharp Endless Need
I’ve been waiting for this book for years. With deft and tender turns, Notifications On is brilliantly befitting its Dickinson lineage. “I’m saying everything I know how to say,” our speaker assures, and blazingly leaves it all on the page. Still more, all that they do not know how to say grows and blooms quietly between this collection’s pages and its reader. Holland is a treasure among us.
— Séamus Isaac Fey, author of Decompose
In Emily Holland’s Notifications On, the speaker announces, “I’m saying everything I know how to say,” as they traverse the lush caverns of longing for knowledge, for language, for the other, for the self through the contemporary archive of literature, landscapes, and the boundless internet. Image-rich with fruits that “hide in the curls of crisp leaves” and “moths [that] metronome against the fluorescent lights,” these poems are peppered with crisp interiority as they navigate the nature of desire—the “sticky pulp” of them resonating like the sugar sap of new and old loves. Amid the shadows and ghosts of past paramours and selves, the speaker arcs toward fresh wants. “Tired of mistaking / everything for love,” they roam “rural roads…to suture the gap / between who I am and who I was” through prose sequences, sonnets, erasure, the golden shovel, and the duplex in poems that nimbly use form as another vehicle for comprehension in this striking debut collection.
— Chet’la Sebree, author of Blue Opening
Emily Holland’s Notifications On is a brilliant collection on love and sex in modernity. I thrilled at its imaginative brain-tickles. Holland both invents form and calls on its traditions as they meditate on our current moment and the ancient. I was struck by the epiphany “Repetition means nothing now” and thought of Gertrude Stein who talked about repetition as emphasis. The phrase kept calling as another poem read, “I want to keep wanting.” Together, they edge, near-combust the book’s tension. The voice of these poems uses their external markers—lesbian of working-class-farm origins—to both contain and complicate their inner world haunted by Eros. I’ve never read desire’s questions chewed on this way, its refusal, pleads.
— K. Iver, author of Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
Notifications On paints portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes that leave you reflecting. In intimate moments and interruptions, Holland asks: in an era full of ASMR, notifications, and ideals about love, what is it that we truly desire? Yes, we want poetry, but make it for the dykes, because at the end of the world, I’d trust the real yearners to be the ones left standing.
— Chanlee Luu, author of The Machine Autocorrects Code To I
Emily Holland’s Notifications On is a wonderfully textured, imminently heartfelt, and deftly crafted debut. Each poem reminds us how to allow intimacy into our everyday, booked-and-busy lives.
— Steven Leyva, author of The Opposite of Cruelty