Hold Me Tight

By Jason Schneiderman

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781597098304

Jason Schneiderman

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.

Book preview

I.

Anger

When I was angry,

I kept asking how

anger works.

No one understood

my question.

Friends thought I was joking.

Or being obtuse.

Friends would say: What

do you mean

how anger works.

Anger is anger. What

are you asking.

And I would say:

Well. Is anger

a finite

material.

Is anger like hydrogen,

and there’s simply

a certain amount

of it in the universe.

Is there a zero sum

of anger, a law

of the conservation

of anger,

and can we

pass it back

and forth.

Can you take my anger

and leave me less?

Can I take your