We Are All in All of Us in Love and War bridging paintings and poetry
Title: We Are All in All of Us in Love and War bridging paintings and poetryPublished by: literaryartpress.com
We Are in All of Us in Love and War bridging paintings and poetry
Overview
This is a groundbreaking, imaginative collection of poems and paintings, paired with each other, by talented artist, poet, and psychoanalyst Laurie Hollman. Ekphrasis is an ancient literary practice that describes visual art with text. Artist, poet, and psychoanalyst Laurie Hollman’s ekphrastic collection of her poems, each associated with one of her paintings, sensitively reveals how giving and receiving love during peacetime and wartime endows individuals with emotional strength. Love that can endure in the aftermath of war and violence can support those suffering from traumatic grief to recover a sense of belonging so essential to potential healing.
Viewing Laurie’s opening painting alongside her “Artist’s Notes,” she explains how we turn to poetry and paintings to express and learn about ourselves.
Our senses lay the groundwork for how art and aesthetics offer viewers pathways to amplify their mental health and well-being. When we get into the flow of our emotions, the limbic system deep within the forebrain processes our feelings…When a poem resonates with us, it does so at a neurological level associated with meaning-making. Poetry is a safe way to engage with difficult emotions. When we interact with artwork, we may feel the world changing in a new way. When viewing poetry and paintings together, we may be biologically changed and remarkably transformed.
Laurie invites the reader/viewer to take time to view each painting and the poetic lines related to it, enabling a process of discovery that offers new meanings as sensory aesthetics inform feelings and bring a sense of enlightenment not experienced before. Unlike art books perused quickly, Laurie Hollman hopes that there will be pauses, holding a portrait’s gaze or following the paths in a landscape, inspiring feelings of introspection, transformation, and enlightenment as time passes in musing reveries, like meditation, to take hold. She encourages each reader to allow their awareness to hover over paintings, their gaze on an aspect of a scene or portrait not immediately noticed, so that increased insight may be gained and lost and gained again, so that increased insight may be gained and lost and gained again.”
Endorsements
“Hollman’s literary and visual artistry are on display in this heartfelt, diverse collection of poems and artwork about love and war. The book’s simplicity is a strength; most poems are brief and to the point. ‘Tender Trees’ is only six lines long, but this poem crafts a beautiful metaphor of a loved one. The poet’s descriptions are unique and sensory-rich, as in ‘a two-part sun that glares like / a half-cut lemon and the perfumed earthy air of the outdoors.’
The poet experiments with spacing and punctuation in poems like ‘Unwalled Wells’ and ‘Feelings of Voiceless Women,’ lending variety to the reading experience. Hollman is equally talented and versatile in her paintings. The impressive landscapes serve as visual counterparts to each poem, capturing the quiet wonder of her surroundings, while the portraits convey the soulfulness and personality of their subjects.
The darker, abstract artwork in the book’s final section mirrors the moral murkiness of war. Somber poems such as ‘Helmets of War’ unflinchingly describe battlefield horrors, like how ‘rained bodies soundlessly sink in beach sands.’
A tender and virtually stunning book…”
--Kirkus Reviews, 2026
“Working as a community children’s art educator reminds me daily that art is a safe place for complicated feelings. This collection feels the same. Laurie Hollman creates room for tenderness, sorrow, memory, and hope to coexist. Even in the sections shaped by war and trauma, love is expressed in her poems and paintings, to invite readers to slow down, look closely, and feel deeply. To conclude, I must add a quote of poetic lines that stick with me about love while aging with an intimate partner:
I’m not finished::you’re not finished
getting older is only::growing up until we won’t.’”
--Krista Brown, Innovative Art Teacher of children demonstrating the use of oil pastels, aluminum figures, print making, collage, architectural dream spaces, and more.
“Surely a unique collection with poetry and art dancing together, an intimate tango in an ekphrastic wonderland. For me, this approach is a reflection of the fact that there isn’t a single truth, but rather that ‘truth’ is something more complex built up from layers of perspective, views through different lenses.”
--Ian Gouge, prize-winning author of prose and poetry, mentor and editor, whose poetry collections are published widely and can be found at iangougestubstack.com
“We Are in All of Us in Love and War is a moving and luminous collection where poetry and painting meet. Reading it led me to reflect on my own journey of motherhood and on the endurance of love in life’s joys and struggles. Laurie captures both the intimate tenderness of daily care and the resilience that carries us through conflict—this is a work that lingers in the heart long after the page is closed.”
--Hina Khan, LCSW, Program Director, Caring Transitions Program, Elmhurst Hospital and Faculty Advisor and adjunct professor, NYU Silver School of Social Work.
Endorsements
“Hollman’s literary and visual artistry are on display in this heartfelt, diverse collection of poems and artwork about love and war. The book’s simplicity is a strength; most poems are brief and to the point. ‘Tender Trees’ is only six lines long, but this poem crafts a beautiful metaphor of a loved one. The poet’s descriptions are unique and sensory-rich, as in ‘a two-part sun that glares like / a half-cut lemon and the perfumed earthy air of the outdoors.’
The poet experiments with spacing and punctuation in poems like ‘Unwalled Wells’ and ‘Feelings of Voiceless Women,’ lending variety to the reading experience. Hollman is equally talented and versatile in her paintings. The impressive landscapes serve as visual counterparts to each poem, capturing the quiet wonder of her surroundings, while the portraits convey the soulfulness and personality of their subjects.
The darker, abstract artwork in the book’s final section mirrors the moral murkiness of war. Somber poems such as ‘Helmets of War’ unflinchingly describe battlefield horrors, like how ‘rained bodies soundlessly sink in beach sands.’
A tender and virtually stunning book…”
--Kirkus Reviews, 2026
“Working as a community children’s art educator reminds me daily that art is a safe place for complicated feelings. This collection feels the same. Laurie Hollman creates room for tenderness, sorrow, memory, and hope to coexist. Even in the sections shaped by war and trauma, love is expressed in her poems and paintings, to invite readers to slow down, look closely, and feel deeply. To conclude, I must add a quote of poetic lines that stick with me about love while aging with an intimate partner:
I’m not finished::you’re not finished
getting older is only::growing up until we won’t.’”
--Krista Brown, Innovative Art Teacher of children demonstrating the use of oil pastels, aluminum figures, print making, collage, architectural dream spaces, and more.
“Surely a unique collection with poetry and art dancing together, an intimate tango in an ekphrastic wonderland. For me, this approach is a reflection of the fact that there isn’t a single truth, but rather that ‘truth’ is something more complex built up from layers of perspective, views through different lenses.”
--Ian Gouge, prize-winning author of prose and poetry, mentor and editor, whose poetry collections are published widely and can be found at iangougestubstack.com
“We Are in All of Us in Love and War is a moving and luminous collection where poetry and painting meet. Reading it led me to reflect on my own journey of motherhood and on the endurance of love in life’s joys and struggles. Laurie captures both the intimate tenderness of daily care and the resilience that carries us through conflict—this is a work that lingers in the heart long after the page is closed.”
--Hina Khan, LCSW, Program Director, Caring Transitions Program, Elmhurst Hospital and Faculty Advisor and adjunct professor, NYU Silver School of Social Work.
INSPIRATION
I’ve found that prose alone cannot express the power of loving and being loved in times of peace and war. I have used poetic lyrics and painted images in various media to give emotive power to these lived experiences.
This has not been an easy task. With each poem/painting pair, I strive to express emotions residing within me, in the hope that these works expand by evoking feelings consonant with each unique reader/viewer—individual emotions within their minds and bodies.
EXCERPTS
With this poem and painting, the reader/viewer is informed of the meaning of the book’s title.
We are All in All of Us
Like clouds mingling
in the sky.
When another dies, a part of me dies, too
When another laughs, a part of me smiles, too.
When another sings, I whistle in my heart.
When we are in all of us.
With this poem and painting, the reader/viewer is invited to experience a vision of lovers.
Tender Trees
These trees are far more full
than words will ever be.
And you are all my trees
every tree, a temple thee.
And each branch holds my heart
for every branch you hold is me.
Later in the book, the reader/viewer experiences the warring worlds of mothers, fathers, and children.
Cuppa Truth
Someone pounds on the door.
No one answers.
Seven years old—a scream in the night.
The truth is screaming.
Just night terrors, dear.
No. Real terrors. Real monsters.
Music, pounding too. Real music.
No dear. No music.
Is the world dying? Are we the only ones alive?
Sleep, child, sleep.
Is Hitler dead?
In the arms of God. God accepts the dead.
Then there is no God.
No one is killed, simply rumors.
Only a robbery. That’s all.
No, Gestapo…
Make no mistake. There will be others like him.
It’s unimaginable.
Grown-ups forget how to imagine.
They hide what children know.
The clock is ticking faster.
No. It’s the metronome. We forgot to close the lid.
You’re only a child, so you don’t hear the difference.
Cuppa milk to help you sleep?
Named in the Storm of War
Icy rain batters roofs.
Dread eclipses joy.
Sails once full of wind
pierce the darkened sky.
Terror fills a tiny cottage
miles from the warfront
yet encased in fear.
There a newborn
expelled violently
from her mother’s womb
blinks hard eyes.
She enters a warring world
with frost in her blood
and fear in her mind.
Her little shape
bounty braced
in her mother’s arms
barely wails through the night.
Daylight finds mother and infant
yoked awake and aware.
Winds dance over lit crowns
of wondrous whispering trees.
And the baby’s eyes
born hard and grim
now glow wet and wide
catching the lifting light.
And so—
she is named Dawn
ushering in the morn.
A Father’s Love Lost in War
Even when I cannot see
a love lost in war
I think of him forever
in my years of patience.
As I come through ages,
and grow far, far older
unlike the mortal wheel given to him
I want to capture the impossible
and give him moments of now.
I offer myself
like a lone standing tree
once his seedling,
grown older and free.
I offer moments of pleasure
to cut through pain
that vanishes yet comes again.
I offer passage
into the sweet hug of time
that burns an interior light
where no one is.