Ode to the Boy-Rabbit: Ifésinàchi Nwàdiké reviews Wayne Holloway-Smith’s RABBITBOX
RABBITBOX
Wayne Holloway-Smith
Scribner Editions 2026
ISBN: 978-1-3985-5242-5
131pp £12.99
RABBITBOX, Wayne Holloway-Smith’s third poetry collection, sensualises a multi-dimensional theme of domestic abuse through the metaphor of the wardrobe as a rabbit box––a child’s place of unpleasant getaways, a safe space that is dark and eerily comforting. The violence began at 24 Coalbrook Street, in a house constantly ablaze with a father’s erratic temper. Fear compels the persona, a young boy, to shrink away, into the safety of the wardrobe in his bedroom. His fragile mother, a comrade-in-suffering, is stuck in a precarious state, unable to show him the warmth of a mother’s love. The collection stretches the human’s threshold of sanity. It is triggering, the extent of abuse detailed in that slim miracle of a book. Like a hard morsel, the details are only made swallowable by the tenderness of Holloway-Smith’s language in what could be read as an ode to the boy-rabbit.
Holloway-Smith acknowledges in the end note that his book ‘takes its title and point of departure from the Spring Volume in the seasonal quartet of Joseph Pintauro’s The Rabbit Box (1970)’ (133). Pintauro’s playful book of poems for children provides a backdrop for Holloway-Smith’s reconfiguration of the young boy’s body as a rabbit burrowing in his wardrobe for protection. In her review of Pintauro’s book for The Marginalian, Maria Popova describes it as ‘a love letter, an elegy for Mother Earth, an incantation against war, and above all a vibrant invitation to aliveness.’ It is striking then that Holloway-Smith likens the young boy’s body to a wronged earth and that each time he takes refuge in the wardrobe, he asserts his right to life. The young boy is:
king of nervous laughter
touched in the wits
a small body hidden
in the wardrobe or else
caught too young
in the guttural clinch
of a home’s full wind (5).
The young boy’s father, on the other hand, is ‘a man whose temper / is bigger than god…’ (5). On this account, the ‘worried little creature’ concludes he was ‘born into the terrible / hosanna of language’ (5). RABBIT BOX is peopled by four main characters: the terrified ‘boy-rabbit’; his father, whom he dubs ‘man-shadow’, ‘dad-shadow’; his mother, whose own language is a ‘quiet-backing away… to the kitchen’ (8); and a young girl whose love never truly took off.
In RABBIT BOX, we confront a fragile home where the occupants, except the terrifying father, live in terror and tiptoe about to not awaken the tempestuous beast. He runs the home like a concentration camp. Holloway-Smith symbolizes this through a stylistic formatting of poems like ‘SHE’ and ‘A QUESTION’ whereby stanzas are indented, left and right aligned to the pages’ edges, creating a visual imagery of the abused characters’ intent to escape, to flee from harm. Some stanzas begin halfway down to page, invoking the consistent theme of fear of a looming ‘dad-shadow’ who could appear the next minute with ‘fists slamming’. A home should be a child’s safest place, especially if such home is animated by the presence of the child’s parents. It is cruel fate to suffer such violence in a home that is not of one’s own making.
Wayne Holloway-Smith creates a space in this collection for the discussion of the consequences of unhealed trauma. ‘Man-shadow’ is a product of child abuse who runs to the patronage of alcohol but frequently loses his ‘brass band’ temper by setting the pots and pans flying, the shoes kicking, the doorframes booming in a way that unsettles ‘boy rabbit’ and his mother. In a bid to decipher whether the young boy is alone in his world of trauma and fear, Holloway-Smith asks what could be likened as the most poignant and gut-wrenching question in the book: ‘how many a home enunciates its offspring this way: / its song holding a child by the throat… and how many an offspring grows tough… in the depth of the wardrobe (10). Holloway-Smith leaves out the question marks at the end of these questions because there are, indeed, no answers. This is seen in the intentional use of repetition of titles (‘SHE’, ‘A QUESTION’, ‘A HISTORY’), page after page, to create the illusion of being stuck in an unpleasant situation. A flicker of hope rises in the genuine love of a girl who feels star-crossed with the young rabbit. But he is reluctant to submit to this love––a love that is too good to be true––having known only fire and brimstone. The reluctance soon leads to withdrawal by the young girl, and a heartbreaking story finds completion in its grimness.
It is striking how the man here is unnamed, going only by the violent appellations his frightened son thinks up. It is befitting, for a cowardly father whose rare physical attractions became the very tools he uses to terrorise his family. His wife had fallen in love with his masculine exuberance, ‘his muscular shoulder…’ and had wanted ‘to be close to touch it’ (13). How wrong she was! His son, on the other hand, craves to be properly loved like a child by his father, ‘as is the want of any small child/ to know itself as safely held’ (80), but he too had been wrong like his mother.
Global literary canons are consistent with thematic iterations of domestic violence in a way that situates RABBIT BOX in a familiar world. Wayne Holloway-Smith stands out in that world through his deployment of sensory, nonjudgmental language and tone––a buffer to an otherwise horrific tale of toxic masculinity and an endless cycle of abuse in which the image of the ‘ogre-father’s breathing’ as he slept, is a magnification of terror: ‘the threat he posed of waking’ (98).
Oct 27 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Wayne Holloway-Smith
Ode to the Boy-Rabbit: Ifésinàchi Nwàdiké reviews Wayne Holloway-Smith’s RABBITBOX
RABBITBOX
Wayne Holloway-Smith
Scribner Editions 2026
ISBN: 978-1-3985-5242-5
131pp £12.99
RABBITBOX, Wayne Holloway-Smith’s third poetry collection, sensualises a multi-dimensional theme of domestic abuse through the metaphor of the wardrobe as a rabbit box––a child’s place of unpleasant getaways, a safe space that is dark and eerily comforting. The violence began at 24 Coalbrook Street, in a house constantly ablaze with a father’s erratic temper. Fear compels the persona, a young boy, to shrink away, into the safety of the wardrobe in his bedroom. His fragile mother, a comrade-in-suffering, is stuck in a precarious state, unable to show him the warmth of a mother’s love. The collection stretches the human’s threshold of sanity. It is triggering, the extent of abuse detailed in that slim miracle of a book. Like a hard morsel, the details are only made swallowable by the tenderness of Holloway-Smith’s language in what could be read as an ode to the boy-rabbit.
Holloway-Smith acknowledges in the end note that his book ‘takes its title and point of departure from the Spring Volume in the seasonal quartet of Joseph Pintauro’s The Rabbit Box (1970)’ (133). Pintauro’s playful book of poems for children provides a backdrop for Holloway-Smith’s reconfiguration of the young boy’s body as a rabbit burrowing in his wardrobe for protection. In her review of Pintauro’s book for The Marginalian, Maria Popova describes it as ‘a love letter, an elegy for Mother Earth, an incantation against war, and above all a vibrant invitation to aliveness.’ It is striking then that Holloway-Smith likens the young boy’s body to a wronged earth and that each time he takes refuge in the wardrobe, he asserts his right to life. The young boy is:
king of nervous laughter
touched in the wits
a small body hidden
in the wardrobe or else
caught too young
in the guttural clinch
of a home’s full wind (5).
The young boy’s father, on the other hand, is ‘a man whose temper / is bigger than god…’ (5). On this account, the ‘worried little creature’ concludes he was ‘born into the terrible / hosanna of language’ (5). RABBIT BOX is peopled by four main characters: the terrified ‘boy-rabbit’; his father, whom he dubs ‘man-shadow’, ‘dad-shadow’; his mother, whose own language is a ‘quiet-backing away… to the kitchen’ (8); and a young girl whose love never truly took off.
In RABBIT BOX, we confront a fragile home where the occupants, except the terrifying father, live in terror and tiptoe about to not awaken the tempestuous beast. He runs the home like a concentration camp. Holloway-Smith symbolizes this through a stylistic formatting of poems like ‘SHE’ and ‘A QUESTION’ whereby stanzas are indented, left and right aligned to the pages’ edges, creating a visual imagery of the abused characters’ intent to escape, to flee from harm. Some stanzas begin halfway down to page, invoking the consistent theme of fear of a looming ‘dad-shadow’ who could appear the next minute with ‘fists slamming’. A home should be a child’s safest place, especially if such home is animated by the presence of the child’s parents. It is cruel fate to suffer such violence in a home that is not of one’s own making.
Wayne Holloway-Smith creates a space in this collection for the discussion of the consequences of unhealed trauma. ‘Man-shadow’ is a product of child abuse who runs to the patronage of alcohol but frequently loses his ‘brass band’ temper by setting the pots and pans flying, the shoes kicking, the doorframes booming in a way that unsettles ‘boy rabbit’ and his mother. In a bid to decipher whether the young boy is alone in his world of trauma and fear, Holloway-Smith asks what could be likened as the most poignant and gut-wrenching question in the book: ‘how many a home enunciates its offspring this way: / its song holding a child by the throat… and how many an offspring grows tough… in the depth of the wardrobe (10). Holloway-Smith leaves out the question marks at the end of these questions because there are, indeed, no answers. This is seen in the intentional use of repetition of titles (‘SHE’, ‘A QUESTION’, ‘A HISTORY’), page after page, to create the illusion of being stuck in an unpleasant situation. A flicker of hope rises in the genuine love of a girl who feels star-crossed with the young rabbit. But he is reluctant to submit to this love––a love that is too good to be true––having known only fire and brimstone. The reluctance soon leads to withdrawal by the young girl, and a heartbreaking story finds completion in its grimness.
It is striking how the man here is unnamed, going only by the violent appellations his frightened son thinks up. It is befitting, for a cowardly father whose rare physical attractions became the very tools he uses to terrorise his family. His wife had fallen in love with his masculine exuberance, ‘his muscular shoulder…’ and had wanted ‘to be close to touch it’ (13). How wrong she was! His son, on the other hand, craves to be properly loved like a child by his father, ‘as is the want of any small child/ to know itself as safely held’ (80), but he too had been wrong like his mother.
Global literary canons are consistent with thematic iterations of domestic violence in a way that situates RABBIT BOX in a familiar world. Wayne Holloway-Smith stands out in that world through his deployment of sensory, nonjudgmental language and tone––a buffer to an otherwise horrific tale of toxic masculinity and an endless cycle of abuse in which the image of the ‘ogre-father’s breathing’ as he slept, is a magnification of terror: ‘the threat he posed of waking’ (98).