Becoming Altar: New and Selected Poems by Kyla Houbolt
Reviewed by Pearl Pirie
After reading But Then I Thought by Kyla Houbolt (above/ground, 2023) and Dawn’s Fool https://kylahoubolt.us/dawns-fool.html by Kyla Houbolt (above/ground, 2024) I wanted to read more of this fascinating brain. Trouble is her publications are mostly in the U.S. and getting books in or out of the U.S. is a bugaboo these days, to put it mildly. Nonetheless, it was achieved though it took months.
These chapbooks and then, finally her Becoming Altar: New and Selected Poems by Kyla Houbolt (Subpress, 2025) all struck me as perfectly delighting, a 5/5. I happily read them all multiple times. It’s so thrilling to find a new writer to get all completist about. This book collates up 5 collections then adds a new section.
She is curious and playful but looking at large questions of our duty in the world. Our world is not just people of our locale, gender-spectrum point, colour, religion, class, politics and temperament. All life is our world. Insects, birds, every eukaryote. If all feels out of whack, have you “Forgotten” (p. 18) to listen to your singing frog? “the most glorious hypnotic love song, a love song to the whole universe but to you as that universe, and without any words the frog will convey to you that you and you alone have a unique and precious role to play in the unfolding of all that is to happen next.”
Frogs and other animal friends reoccur through the poems.
The unique angle taken makes all the difference. “Politics” is an extended analogy of a war of desert frogs vs. swamp frogs in their tyranny of small differences while the snakes watch the discord and eat freely in the resulting scuffles. It is a sort of black humour that gave me a belly laugh. It’s a little bit anarchist and a lot loving and inclusive. Instead of everything shepherded into meaning, there’s a comfort with ambiguity and not knowing. This makes an overlooked sense to me. Things aren’t ether/or mutual exclusive lists of known and verified or taboo to mention existence of. It’s a freeing thing to acknowledge as she does in a poem. p. 74
New Year’s Eve & Some Noises Noodles and butter for supper. A cough and a bark from the bank down below. Loud boom disturbs the heron who flies over squawking. I reply “Squamadoo, squamadoo.” No, I don’t know that that means, but that’s okay, neither does the heron.
There’s a expansive silliness and happiness despite that runs through her poems. Peppered with peppiness, informing the aggressive hummingbird who gets territorial with another (p. 96, “Not a good look, Papa,/I tell him but he don’t care”). Reviewing her book is like being in a painted canyons landscape at sunrise. I could set the camera on delayed shutter and throw it up and whenever wherever it releases, when it lands, it will have captured something beautiful. I don’t have to study the text and try to find an admirable line. I posted “Appropriate Force” on my instagram as #TodaysPoem mid-February. Here’s the first third of it,
“I took an axe to heaven's door
only to find out
it's made of eggshells.
That's stupid.
Why even have a door,
if they're going to make it
out of eggshells?”It tickles the brain, the combination of images, the irreverence, the position of revolution.
Some writers keep their poems at the distance. She interjects. Self-deprecating observation as she writes about Tang mountain poets, (“[I Love the old Chinese mountain poets]”, p. 26) she realizes she has burned her oatmeal while writing the first part of the poem, and that comes into the poem. It breaks the fourth walls, refuses poetry as a hermetically sealed space. It is like an Eileen Myles self-acceptance.
She calls herself out and that doubling back critically, as Phil Hall does as well, delights me. It isn’t all worked out and authoritatively definitive. Try on a concept and discard it even in the process of poeming and let it stay. Why deny it? In “But Then I Thought”’s poem “Autobio, or The Resting Insomniac” (p. 60 in “Becoming Altar”) travels through,
“A wave is just a moving hill made of water. Raindrops are just melted stars. What hooey. My favourite kind. See how that fades down to less and less? That’s a sweet way to travel.”
Have you noticed the psychological baseline of a lot of surreal seems to be depressive? There is a sort of dark humour and sense of all being futile and nightmarish. When I find levity in surreal, it’s a signal I’m in a real deep funk but when I feel content, surreal tends to be too bitter for my palate.
With this, like a fantasy or superhero movie you have to suspend disbelief in the normal rules of physics, rhetorical laws. There’s a dream logic. As in “Recipients” p. 102,
There are four kinds: celery, alphabetical, jughand, and splanchic. Your nerves are on trial. I’m sorry it had to come to this. Dreaming of insomnia, what? Empty parking lots make the stars boring. “They” arrange photos of smashed up cars to enliven the empty schools. Look sharp! there’s a play on. Down in the orchestra pit the organs fight over spilled popcorn.”
Hyperbolic surreality can bridge experience to words. When you are ebullient enough, nonsense also is the best fit to close the gap. Surreal can map the course across the inexpressible joy or silliness or how surreal life is. We see it in the joy of children’s books (One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.) but not as much in English poetry. I’m told that Quebecois poetry does have a lot of surreality.
Brad Richard called her work, “joyful pessimism”. Jordan Davis said “Where else am I going to hear bout spam farms, heron language, wish onions and other statistically improbable but poetically inevitable concepts?”
Where indeed. Let your weird out. It’s unlike anyone else’s.
About the Author
Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener living in North Carolina.
About the Reviewer
Pearl Pirie is in Hills’ Almanach des Collines, an anthology of Gatineau Hills spec fiction 2026, and in The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, 2025 and a forthcoming issues of The Fiddlehead and Kingfisher. She is an English book reviews co-editor of Haiku Canada Review. Recently in chapbooks: Heat Lamp (above/ground press, 2025), We Astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, 2025), and edited for phafours press: Crime and Ornament by Tamsyn Farr (Nov 2025). www.pearlpirie.com
Book Details
Format Paperback
Pages 156
Dimensions 8.5”x5.5”x1”
Weight 2.5 oz.
ISBN 13 9781734130041
ISBN 10 1734130040
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