Keynote
A beloved poet captures the beauty that attention to the public and private offers
Book Title
Hold Everything
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “Moving freely among subjects including technology, politics, the natural world, and memory, Gibson animates his poems with epiphanies both large and small, all made possible by his fine-tuned observation and humor. . . . This perceptive and surprising collection shines.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Poem Excerpt
I wanted to know my role
In the story as winter dozed
through its frozen symposium
I was hoping to find
a better word for how it felt
to be so uncertain
that also meant bathing oceanside
each book was another decision
to learn to live with
when I reached for the oldest ones
they said one day you will know
what it means to be alone
—From “The Little Prince”
In the story as winter dozed
through its frozen symposium
I was hoping to find
a better word for how it felt
to be so uncertain
that also meant bathing oceanside
each book was another decision
to learn to live with
when I reached for the oldest ones
they said one day you will know
what it means to be alone
—From “The Little Prince”
Body
In his latest collection, Dobby Gibson explores the strangeness of the everyday with fresh urgency, inviting us to reawaken and reclaim our fuller selves. Hold Everything moves at the speed of breaking news as it makes a plea for grace in a world running short on mercy. Its epistolary poems put us in correspondence with Edo-period poets and 1980s hair-metal gods, artificial intelligence and hotel soaps. Gibson’s poems remain on alert, demonstrating the many ways a deeper attention to the marvels and horrors of the contemporary world can form a kind of civil disobedience.
Hold Everything gathers up the harbingers of our turbulent world as it reaches for hope and evinces wonder.
Hold Everything gathers up the harbingers of our turbulent world as it reaches for hope and evinces wonder.
List Price
$17.00
Purchase at
Purchase at:
About the Author
Credit: Photographer Credit / Zoe Prinds-Flash
Praise
- “Gibson possesses a sizzling, quick-fire imagination. . . . I miss this kind of expansionist yet sobering wit. The complexity of perceiving our world requires such a poet as this, who entertains but also holds up the mirror unflinchingly.” —Major Jackson
- “Gibson's a poet I never tire of hearing: the more of his work I read the more I want to read. . . . On the one hand, it's sad, as sad as life. On the other, it's not, and thank Gibson for it. He could even be the voice of my generation, if my generation had a beautiful voice.” —Stephanie Burt
- “Every poem in this book tells me something I don’t know, or something I’m always in need of being reminded. . . . Gibson’s Hold Everything shows us what it might mean if only we could hold everything we need to survive, love, and thrive. I love this book.” —Dara Barrois/Dixon
- “There’s grieving in this book and there’s no nonsense nonsense and always feral melancholy and always another chance. It’s a book that forgives us our folly and shows us the many meanings there are when someone says poetry saves lives.” –Dara Barrois/Dixon
