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!