Hold Everything
Poems
by Dobby Gibson
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Pub Date Oct 01 2024 | Archive Date Sep 30 2024
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Description
A beloved poet captures the beauty that attention to the public and private offers
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.
Advance 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
Marketing Plan
National publicity campaign
Bookseller outreach
National author tour
Social media promotion
Targeted digital marketing
National publicity campaign
Bookseller outreach
National author tour
Social media promotion
Targeted digital marketing
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781644453094 |
| PRICE | $17.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 88 |
Links
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Brice M, Reviewer
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!
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