Our Hands Hold Violence: Poems

Description: "Through encounters with the everyday beauty and brutality so much a part of rural and urban Missouri, Our Hands Hold Violence explores what it means to experience and/or perpetuate small and significant acts of violence, toward others and the self"--

Review Quotes: "While it is common practice to say about debut collections that they hard-hit, breath-take, and stun, such hype would not, in this case, be at all hyperbolic. With Our Hands Hold Violence, Kieron Walquist has written not only one of the best debuts but one of the best collections, period, of the last several years, and in doing so joins an exciting new vanguard in American poetry."
--John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry: Poems

"Kieron Walquist's poems are thrilling. He yokes together violences and intimacies, arranges language into dazzling and resonant patterns, and breaks open memory to release music that's torqued and incandescent. This music is queer, rooted in Missouri, and announces the arrival of a voice that sings to and against the place that birthed it."
--Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine