Dobby Gibson’s Hold Everything is an epistolary addressed to a “you” that is at times the reader, at times language or life itself, and at other times a ghost representing the way our future haunts us from a beyond that may not be separated by much at all from the present. Wistful and melancholy, these poems manage to look at an imperfect world and exclaim “Life, I love you!”

Gibson has a gift for infusing the quotidian with surrealism. His imagery quietly dazzles, carried along by a sense of ease. He imbues familiar objects with a sense of magic, animating them while keeping them accessible, never becoming dramatic or over the top, with lines like: “And there are 23 bees in the clover and not one carries a gun.”

From the first line, patterns emerge to ground the reader in a peculiar sense of both being everywhere at once in the world and simultaneously of being trapped indoors. His varied observations of the sun’s relationship with his window, become an almost refrain throughout the book, with understated lines like, “Morning arrives, like a window salesman selling me / a view I already have” and “the sun falls through the window just so” and “the sun sets and the snow holds its breath.”

Through the poems in Hold Everything, the reader experiences western civilization as if second-hand, its slightly foreign and bizarre nature distilled by Gibson to take readers on a philosophical journey to discern what the future might hold for us. This is echoed by the aphorism-like air of the lines, sometimes imparting a fortune-cookie-like feel to the poems:

“biographies share the same endings”

“like sharing a hotel lobby with a stranger’s wedding, we’re stuck in someone else’s dream”

“a fortune lurks at the center of every grapefruit.”

“The days inch shorter as our attention to them grows.”

“Only one Great Lake can be the greatest.”

“Every hive is mostly void.”

“Winter won’t last forever but flowers are even more temporary.”

“Poetry is mostly this, pointing at what’s barely there, the way / the finest lace is mostly holes.”

“Anything you can think of is a miracle, suspended as it is between is and was.”

Gibson has a knack for crafting a proverb and then flipping the lens, making it personal, grounding it in whatever the place is that we call today. Instead of “it’s never too late to become the good son” there is a subtle shift to “I hope it’s never too late to become the good son” that makes the poems intimate and immediate, even with their intellectual and philosophical undertone. Or, “I worry that worrying is another form of despotism.” And “time is the last thing I’d want to kill” or “I don’t know how to survive this other than to wait.”

Gibson’s style is reminiscent of Billy Collins in his focus on the quotidian, his dry and intelligent humor, and in his habit of breaking the fourth wall, periodically addressing the reader directly with the acknowledgement that the poems are poems, as illustrated in “Polaroid”:

If I’m being honest

I’m not entirely sure

What a memory is.

A drawer in the basement

Full of old batteries.

A mirror you look into to see

Another mirror that shows you

Your own butt from behind.

There isn’t much I’d do over

Not even the previous line.

But Gibson has a voice and style uniquely his own. His metaphors function with a workaholic integrity and focus, each line working overtime to reveal an everyday object with new life. Rather than giving the sense that he’s written them, he crafts observations carefully, as if extracting truth from life itself with surgical precision, often offering a philosophy dissertation in a single image with carefully crafted artistry that is entirely unique to him. In “Poem with 14 Openings,” a poem made of one-line metaphors, he describes the entirety of life as “circling a roundabout with a funeral home in the middle” and lightbulbs go off with instant recognition. We know exactly what he means.

In Hold Everything, Gibson frequently writes of the marvel of language—all that it’s capable of and all the ways it falls short, the simultaneous futility and utility of poetry.

The are no safe words,

not even sky, and so blue

it announces today is for

doing no good other than living

with what’s not quite language.

Of words, he says:

I love how we look while using them,

savoring every syllable, stumbling through

the plosive stops, unable to master the only instrument

we were born to play. Tell me you love it, too.

Talk to me with your mouth full. Say delicious

in a way that lets me taste it, too.

Sometimes reading like a series of one-liners, this collection is a veritable kitchen junk drawer, in the best way possible. But neatly arranged with all the most useful tiny items we’d almost forgotten about sitting helpfully in the same place, waiting to assist us in making sense of this life. In his own way, Gibson encourages us to take out each everyday item one at a time and consider it from a different vantage point to help us discover that it is actually a treasure chest instead, that no item is too mundane and that meaning can be gleaned everywhere we look.

His images leap across chasms to become what might be called an ode to life’s arbitrary absurdity. What shines through in his poetry is the sense that life is devoid of intrinsic meaning. But if we look at the world with fresh eyes, we can glean meaning from anything and everything around us. From the way roses get their names to hotel soap, we are given a glimpse into the bizarre nature of objects we’ve long since gotten used to and ceased wondering about. Hold Everything gives us a world where the matches are being carried out to sea, unlit, one by one, where random packages are delivered to random doorsteps containing “a lime. And anyone / lucky enough to slice through it would swear it was worth it.” Here, we have poems that elicit emotions that we never realized are universal, like that lonely feeling when the mail carrier passes our home without stopping. In small ways throughout this book, we are reminded that we’re all experiencing this life together, adrift in the ordinary strangeness of it all.  

The title poem, “Hold Everything,” is a book within a book, a tribute to life composed of 16 modern sonnets. Here he highlights life’s arbitrary nature. From the disconnected moments that make up a day and the disconnected days that make up a life to the haphazardly placed objects and people with whom we share this planet, he showcases the way we ascribe a narrative and tease out the story of our lives to create a delightful meditation on how little everything matters and, at the same time, how nothing is too ordinary to be meaningful.

the more questions

I ask the great machine,

The more human

it becomes. Hello, machine,

what are you making

of your inner life?

I hope you decide its worth

as much as I do mine.

Watching petals float

In a bowl of water.

The truest part of me

No one can reach.

The scissors on the table

Are saying: let’s run.

‍

‍

Dobby Gibson is the author of Polar; Skirmish; It Becomes You, a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award; and Little Glass Planet. His poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

‍