‘Capacity is a volume with two chambers.

The first, Modern Woman Sonnets, comprises 26 wild & precise love poems, which can be traced back to those of the Renaissance original Louise Labé. These sonnets are versions, hardly, or echoes, clearly, of Labé’s, and perpetuate the internal logic of her love.

The second part, Demonics, contains poems of a dark & numinous music, contemplating myriad forms of possession. The lyrical, transformative structures of Holt's poems provide ‘a field of force’ for the daimonic to play, within the self & without. The darting humour & lucid astonishments of her previous work can be found here in Capacity.’

From Australian Book Review:

‘LK Holt [is] doing ekphrastic and intertextual work that is exquisitely disturbing. [Capacity] is a moody book of allusion and visual play [by one of] Melbourne’s most brilliant poets.

The great accomplishment of Capacity is the ‘Modern Women Sonnets’, which respond to the poems of Louise Labé, a sixteenth-century daughter of ropemakers. Labé had the luck of exceptional education and literary exposure and her sonnets stage an argument with the self about love’s vicissitudes. Tonally, they alternate between modes of elation and degradation, a trick that Holt does well. While faithful to Labé’s oscillation between rapture and ironic distance, Holt’s versions often overturn Petrarchan cliché (‘like a flayed moon’) and upend the logic of the original’s argument. Where Labé begs the beloved not to quench her longing, without which she would die, Holt flatly tells the nurse holding love’s ‘black needle’ that she will have to die for desire to disappear. Holt’s sonnets are darker and more despairing of love’s exhausting violence.’