HOLD EVERYTHING

Forthcoming from Graywolf Press in October 2024.

Hold Everything moves at the speed of breaking news as it makes a plea for grace in a world running short on mercy. Its epistolaries 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 can form a kind of civil disobedience.

"With humor and existential urgency, Hold Everything makes visible all the questions that carry us forward better attuned to the moment we are living. Gibson possesses a sizzling, quick-fire imagination, one that can utter, “each of us has been evicted from / our false palace of eternity.” I miss this kind of expansionist yet sobering wit. The complexity of perceiving our world requires such a poet as this, who entertains but also holds up the mirror unflinchingly." —Major Jackson

“Gibson’s a poet I never tire of hearing: The more of his work I read the more I want to read… He could even be the voice of my generation, if my generation had a beautiful voice.” —Stephanie Burt

“Every poem in this book tells me something I don’t know, or something I’m always in need of being reminded… Gibson’s Hold Everything shows us what it might mean if only we could hold everything we need to survive, love, and thrive. I love this book.” —Dara Barrois/Dixon

LITTLE GLASS PLANET

“Gibson is masterful with imagery. [His] writing is smart and crisp.” —Elisabeth Lund, The Washington Post

“Exuberant, electric, and frank.” —BuzzFeed Favorite Books of Spring 2019

“[These] poems are stinging, exceedingly perceptive and, most of all, insistent that there is still a grace to be found in the world, if one is willing to see it.” —Shelf Awareness, starred review

“Charmingly funny.”—Publishers Weekly

“Idiosyncratic and memorable, Gibson’s poetry will reward readers even through its moments of anguish.”—Library Journal

“Poems are thoughtful and humble. Some are not easy. All are worth reading.”—The St. Paul Pioneer Press

“It’s the kind of poetry every generation may need.”—Stephanie Burt, Rain Taxi Review

“It’s clear to me why we love to read him —word choice, tone, wonder, plus sweet bemusement.”—Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

“There is nothing like reading poems by Dobby Gibson. No one else writes with such irresistibly odd and goofy generosity, such humble intelligence, such playful, painful, and hilarious compassion. I greet each new book by him with delicious anticipation, saying, first to myself and then to anyone who will listen, this is his best one yet, and here I am doing it again.”—Matthew Zapruder

It Becomes You

2013 Believer Book Award Finalist
2014 Minnesota Book Award Finalist

"Poems of grace and invention. . . . In Gibson’s hands the lyric form becomes enlivened. This is his most generous and assured volume to date." — The Believer

“Gibson got noticed for his first two books, which combined a sparky, bizarre postsurrealism with an understated, familiar sadness. This third outing might be his best.” — Publishers Weekly

“Deftly quilts witty observation with moments of lyric intensity.”— Minneapolis Star Tribune

SKIRMISH

2010 Minnesota Book Award Finalist

“Poems hum with gloomy humor and the mood of pregnant anticipation one finds in a Paul Auster novel. Gibson is no escapist, though, portraying an anxious America in the new millennium.” — Publishers Weekly

“[Readers] expect not only to be moved but to have a little fun… [Gibson] understands this. In his second book, Skirmish, he shakes the reader at every turn.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A smart, clever, pyrotechnical book.” — The Rumpus

POLAR

2004 Beatrice Hawley Award Winner (Alice James Award)
2006 Minnesota Book Award Finalist

“I have read few more quotable first books … Polar is friendly, yearning, observant, immediately winning and witty.” — Stephanie Burt, Yale Review

“Teems with a language so alive and so imaginative that one cannot help but read on with wonder and rapture.” — Bloomsbury Review

"Gibson often reminds us that the seemingly illogical leaps the imagination makes can many times push out into deeper emotional territory."―Gulf Coast