I am so thankful to Graywolf Press, Dobby Gibson, and Netgalley for granting me advanced access to this galley before publication day. I really enjoyed the dialogue and plot of this book and can’t wait to chat this one up with my friends!

So gut-wrenchingly piercing that I'm still trying to process. Perfectly captures post-pandemic interior and exterior life.

This is a can't-miss masterpiece. I'm thinking this might be the collection to help my students see the magic and majesty of poetry as an expression of the human condition.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for providing me with a digital copy to review.

"Hold Everything" is a hard clap on the shoulder before a hug, It's biting, it brings you back to reality. Incredibly well written, this collection of poetry focuses on life & death, family, and self reflection as a poet. The more you read the more wit and lyric you find. Gibson's honed his craft, making language feel smooth and malleable as the reader takes their journey through. A fierce recommendation for any poetry lover.

My favorite poems are: "Poem with 14 Openings", "Small Craft Talk", "Hold Everything", and "How to Become a Poet."

Dobbie Gibson’s fifth poetry collection, “Hold Everything: Poems” (Graywolf Press, 2024) is nuanced, bittersweet, and suffused with clever wordplay.

His unique poem titles (“Boingo Hotspot,” “Poem for David Lee Roth, “Self-Portrait in a Bathroom Mirror”) in “Hold Everything” provide relatability, humor, and pop culture references, while his concise summations of emotional experiences leave me wanting more of his poetry. (Thank goodness for backlist titles!)

The piece “Poem Written on the Back of a Program During My Daughter’s Violin Recital” plucked my heartstrings. The back and forth of Gibson watching his daughter perform, while recalling his own unappreciated trombone lessons of youth, mimics the questioning timbre and refrain of music.

Thank you to Dobbie Gibson, Graywolf Press, and NetGalley for the eARC!

Hold Everything is a magnification of moments special and unseen. There’s an element of nostalgia and remembrance for time that was, while yet still present. I think I would enjoyed it more if the kindle version was better laid out. There were many times when the titles blended into the poems. I don’t think this was intentional as it made it difficult to differentiate when one poem ended and another began.

Thank you to NetGalley for this e-arc.

in this collection of personal poems, you never know what is coming next and yet it flows in a way that makes unexplainable sense. Some of them lost me, but the amount of quotes I wrote down is a call for help. It's such an amalgamation of experience, specifically the ones where you come out of body for a moment and appreciate the murmur of life or the silence of comfort

Thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for the ARC!

Dobby Gibson’s "Hold Everything" is a giddy, tonal playground, suggesting a kind of humility in poems that are honest enough to just show off.

"Hold Everything" feels very much like a post-pandemic collection. Its poems are filled with the knick-knacks that only became noticeable after months of staring at them in isolation, and the speaker treats them with the same attention he devotes to recurring (but momentary) questions of legacy and responsibility. Likewise, there are lockdown mantras that now feel ill-fitting, as seen in pieces like “Shadow Puppet”—“Sorry, I was on mute. / Can you see my slides now?”

The speaker seems to tacitly ask us what to do with all this experience. How do we hold all these things we can’t categorize?

Within this book, the answer feels like juggling. The speaker lobs non sequiturs at the reader and plucks at tired aphorisms until there’s fruit. The book celebrates absurdity and invites people to see it as a sort of new form of appreciation—to stare at something until it’s ridiculous enough to be loved and renamed. Certain lines are almost euphoric in their excess, but in a way that never feels self-indulgent.

The collection’s titular poem is spectacular, encompassing all the themes of the book and issuing its thesis: “Poetry is mostly this, pointing at what’s barely there, the way the finest lace is mostly holes.” With this line, all of the book’s wonderful quirks are recast with a clear intention—to draw attention to rare moments of genuine perspective, not merely within the collection but within life itself. It’s a premise that allows the poems to play freely with the opulence of language while acknowledging it as such, as seen in the contrast between “Prattle,” a poem that praises words, and “Poem Never to be Read Aloud,” a piece that recognizes their failure.

All in all, "Hold Everything" is a wonderful collection of poems, and I admire Dobby Gibson’s ability to shape puckishness and precision into a collection of such remarkable focus. I'm excited to revisit this and his earlier work!