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Hold Everything: Poems
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.
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.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
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December 13, 2025It feels wrong to rate poetry and a collection. These are the bangers I very much enjoyed: (pages: 8, 11, 25, 31, 39, 62, 63, 68, 69)
May 12, 2024
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, the speaker bumbles through 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?”
Gibson 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 they bear fruit. The book celebrates absurdity and invites people to see it as a 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!
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, the speaker bumbles through 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?”
Gibson 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 they bear fruit. The book celebrates absurdity and invites people to see it as a 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!
May 5, 2025
A collection of poems about the everyday.
from Stand Tall: "Sooner or later you'll hear / the lonesome whistle of your blood, too, / rushing through your head at midnight / as you chip ice from your windshield / using an expired credit card / adorned with a peculiar name / that could only be your own."
from Poem for David Lee Roth: "David Lee Roth, you confused me when I was ten / and I saw you bare-chested wearing leather chaps / on that poster in my friend's bedroom, / I though you were Farrah Fawcett. / I wanted to touch your feathered mane / and the hypnotizing Alexander Calder spin / of your earrings."
from Stand Tall: "Sooner or later you'll hear / the lonesome whistle of your blood, too, / rushing through your head at midnight / as you chip ice from your windshield / using an expired credit card / adorned with a peculiar name / that could only be your own."
from Poem for David Lee Roth: "David Lee Roth, you confused me when I was ten / and I saw you bare-chested wearing leather chaps / on that poster in my friend's bedroom, / I though you were Farrah Fawcett. / I wanted to touch your feathered mane / and the hypnotizing Alexander Calder spin / of your earrings."
October 4, 2024
ARC given by NetGalley for Honest 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."
"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."
December 22, 2024
Brilliant! I love these poems so much.
March 23, 2025
Beautiful. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ love the stars/filled in stars
July 16, 2025
4.5 stars rounded up
October 1, 2024
"let's start at the beginning, I know I will always find you there"
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
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
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews