Review: Bill Hollands’ Mangrove
By Evan Green
Bill Hollands’s debut collection, Mangrove (published by ELJ Editions, 2025), takes readers through poems of nostalgia, grief, and family, primarily set against the lush backdrop of Florida. Raised in Miami, Hollands paints vivid images not only of the Floridian environment, but also the losses that he has faced. Hollands’s poetry also teems with references to the famous faces of his youth, all while he explores those personal memories. Combining this grief, and references to bygone 70s TV, Mangrove is a moving reflection on a queer life lived to the fullest. In tender and reflective poems, it guides readers through personal transformation and transformations in our televised culture.
From the beginning of his collection, it’s clear how large an impact both television and the natural environment had on Hollands as a child. Recurring images of verdant plant life alongside references to stars from the 60s through the 80s paint the picture of a childhood perched at a sliding glass door between the light of the outdoors and the glow of the television screen. The collection evokes feelings of nostalgia for that late-twentieth century moment—in all its velvet.
In the first section, Hollands dwells on a queer childhood, artfully reminiscing on a time full of new experiences and personal hardships. The second section focuses on Hollands’s family as he ponders the loss of several loved ones with bittersweet remembrance. Finally, the third section reflects on Hollands’s life as a whole, touching on emotion-filled moments from both his childhood and present-day life as a partner, parent, and teacher.
A highlight of the first section is “No Soap Radio.” This poem explores the innocence of youth through the lens of several of Hollands’ own experiences, asserting that he’ll believe anything he’s told. His voice is conversational and slightly self-mocking, looking back on these memories with both humor and lingering vulnerability. The title is a reference to a practical joke whose meaningless punchline exposes those “out of the loop,” reinforcing the poem’s focus on gullibility:
Tell me anything, I’ll believe it. This one time
a man I was going to have sex with told me
that his parrot gave good head. I stared
at that parrot, its stony beak, dark nub
of a tongue, and believed him.
Framed by the sentence, “Tell me anything, I’ll believe it,” Hollands uses a rather comical situation to emphasize the naivety and potential desire for intimacy he possessed in his youth. The poem is all one stanza, coming off as a story being told to the reader in a blurt and developing a sense of confiding closeness to the speaker.
The second section presents readers with “Sunburn,” a poem about the loss of one of Hollands’s brothers. This poem is an instance in which the speaker allows for more uninhibited grief, whereas elsewhere we see grief presented in a more mixed way, sometimes with humor or a sense of the speaker’s resilience. The speaker here addresses his brother, telling him that he is like an unfinished piece of art:
Center piece, middle
Brother, you left an
Incomplete poem
Or should I say my
Memory is partial,
The heart of it gone
In contrast to the anecdotal tone of “No Soap Radio,” this poem takes a more restrained approach. The poem uses stanzas of three lines with five syllables each, providing a meditative, even cut-short, quality to the piece, while the enjambment accentuates the sense of incompleteness. In this elegy to his late brother, Hollands maintains that the poem is incomplete, ending with the stanza: “Seven syllables— / Reader, I tried, I / Cannot finish it.” Are these lines gasping or just numb? Either way, we feel that the grief is ongoing.
A standout from the final section is “The Love Boat,” a poem filled to the brim with references to icons of 60s through 80s pop culture. This piece, named after the hit 70s show of the same name, perfectly encapsulates the television Hollands watched as a child. The poem reads as if a dream, reflecting the unreal quality these celebrities had to a young Hollands. The speaker, a second-person I, has arrived on the Love Boat and quickly discovers they’re accompanied by the stars of the time:
You get to your cabin
and are surprised to find David Cassidy standing there
in a towel.
The poem sets up to be a fun sex fantasy, and Hollands’s speaker notably leaves most straight women on shore (Charo can stay!) The boat fills with idols and heartthrobs turning Hollands’s childhood pop-culture landscape into a campy playground.
. . . The ship’s horn
blows and you follow Charo as she cuchi cuchi’s up
to the deck. Confetti explodes. Goodbye, Jo Anne Worley!
Goodbye, Barbi Benton and Adrienne Barbeau!
Queer stars like Christy MacNichol and Meredith Baxter reject handsome, straight actors, and the speaker wants David Cassidy to sing just to him, but he’s singing to Florence Henderson. It’s wish-fulfillment gone bizarrely askew. Yet beneath the glitter of the small screen lies a feeling of longing. Through the poem, Hollands reveals how these TV icons shaped not only his childhood imagination but also his early queer desire. The poem becomes more than a dream; it’s a revision of the shows Hollands grew up with, and here he attempts to wistfully reshape them into a world where he finally gets to be the protagonist.
This poem masterfully highlights the dreamlike nostalgia we have for the celebrities of our childhood, and Mangrove is expert at this kind of nostalgia, yet appreciative of life in the present. “I’m fifty-nine and just starting / to see them,” Hollands writes in the last poem, “Tree.” “Before / when I put one in a poem / it was only for a bit of local color— / a palm tree here, a mangrove there— / the trees of my childhood / mostly. Or maybe I needed / a metaphor—roots and all that.” As he explores these roots with an offhand voice, in this poem and in the whole collection, Hollands shows us a person grappling with love and loss and glitz—the vibrancy of television, of nature, of a yearning self.
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