Hold Everything

Gibson’s deeply enjoyable latest (after Little Glass Planet) marvels at small acts of attention. Moving freely among subjects including technology, politics, the natural world, and memory, Gibson animates his poems with epiphanies both large and small, all made possible by his fine-tuned observation and humor. For example, in a poem that cleverly articulates the paradoxical necessity of continuous human input in the development of artificial intelligence, Gibson muses, “The more questions/ I ask the great machine,/ the more human/ it becomes. Hello, machine,/ what are you making/ of your inner life?” The poems use direct address to great effect, startling the reader into a deeper sense of the fantastic within the seemingly mundane: “Life, I love you! Fireworks, fossil record,/ Twizzlers, tonsillectomy, it mumbles back.” In the lengthy title poem, Gibson’s attentiveness gathers steam, collecting a far-ranging assortment of observations to reframe reality in unique ways: “The morning is/ not yet its own. Biographies share the same ending./ I glance at the sun the way a thief looks at his fingers.” This perceptive and surprising collection shines. (Oct.)