[12/15/25] Houbolt, Kyla: Becoming Altar

Subpress Collective, paperback

Publication Date: December 15, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 

Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener living in North Carolina.

The first full collection by a poet who in the words of poet and critic Susan M. Schultz, “asks how anyone can be a poet, then answers with another question: ‘How can we not?’”

Kyla Houbolt’s poems are just so fresh and generous it’s delightful. They want to give the reader real things, but not as a burden… something to look at on the window sill that gets the sun. They go around ‘putting a knot in the universe’ with their quick images, alive to the ‘glancing unfelt / blow’ of line breaks, the wise surprise of scattered rhyme. Go on, try one. Take a few if you like. —Jeremy Noel-Tod, editor of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry