In five poetic sequences, Jason Schneiderman's Hold Me Tight considers life in a new age of anxiety as technology and violence inform new forms of selfhood and apocalypse seems always around the corner. Starting with a long poem about his own struggle to find peace, the collection is searingly grounded in the personal, anchored to Schneiderman's own life. The collection moves to a sequence of parables about wolves, which obliquely consider intractable political conflicts and the emotional fallout of relationships that are structured around predators and prey. The next sequences focus on technology and art, looking at how technologies extend the possibilities of the human body, which alters what it means to be human. A long set of poems about Chris Burden explore the artist's movement from the personal, self-inflicted violence of his early work to the larger questions of political violence that inform his later work. In the final sequence, Schneiderman imagines a series of "last things"-in which finality gives meaning to the people and things in question. In the end, Schneiderman's project invokes a kind of old fashioned humanism, embracing the ruptures in our contemporary ways of living and thinking.

About the Author
Jason Schneiderman is the author of four books of poems: Hold Me Tight (Red Hen Press 2020), Primary Source (Red Hen Press 2016), Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press 2010), and Sublimation Point (Four Way Books 2004). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2016). His poetry and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. He is an Associate Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY and lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

"Jason Schneiderman's poems are rife with a dark and gorgeous intelligence. If I compare them to a razor in an apple, please understand that I mean both the razor and the apple." -Michael Cunningham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"Jason Schneiderman's Hold Me Tight is a tour de force of risk and vulnerability. The images that populate this book-from wolves to submarines-show how every story we've ever been told (every fairy tale heard, every movie watched) becomes an internalized part of our reality. And that reality is made all the more real when we can talk about it. These poems read like a wrought conversation the speaker only wishes he could have: "I needed / that story once; I'm telling it to you now, / because I know I may need it again." And the discursive mode here always leads us to a place of surprise, a place where Schneiderman can declare, "This is the one thing / I have never told anyone. I still believe in the circle. / I may be the last, but I believe." What a tenderly beautiful book!" -Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

"Although the fairy tale-inspired poems in one of this book's sequences, 'The Book of Wolves,' are not without their charms, and the 'Chris Burden Suite' is memorable for its interrogation of the nature of art and its presentation of Chris Burden's art (the suite is also an elegy for the artist, who died in 2015), the real heart of Schneiderman's book is 'The Book of Lasts,' a series of poems that imagines the endling, or last surviving member, of a variety of different people and items: the last book, widow, mirror, baby, etc. This is a playful, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes funny, series of poems that are conceptually inventive. And while I admired and enjoyed a number of other poems, especially 'In Memoriam, Fanny Imlay (1794-1816),' and 'Voxel' (word-hoarders! please read this poem!), this concluding series was one I returned to a number of times in the past few months." -Mark Wagenaar, Plume

Book Information
ISBN 9781597098298
Author Jason Schneiderman
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Red Hen Press
Publisher Red Hen Press