In Jed Myers' beautiful and bracing collection, Learning to Hold, we are invited to consider the trauma of war, genocide, and The Holocaust, how "What stories aren't told are lived" and "Memories course the umbilicus." Despite the near-constant backbeat of the human predilection for strife, Myers revels in small moments of gratitude, reminding us "To stop / and honor the battered heads of the rushes," and that "maples and firs ... are never toppled to ground / till they're ancestor old." In these reverential poems, ancestors sputter and flicker like guiding spirits. Fervent and musical, these are the poems I want to reach for as we "remain mingled / in our mother's breath."
-Martha Silano, author of Reckless Lovely and Gravity Assist
Jed Myers' poetic power is the gale force that blows through the pages of Learning to Hold, as this poetry collection wrestles to grasp the whole of humanity's complexity and brutality. A boy's childhood begins as "memories course the umbilicus," and the legacy of family "history held in raised hands, winces, /flinches, and those strange-lit dreams" gives way to a larger landscape of the broken and chaotic world, where "dreams find too much to hold." But these are not dreamy poems. These poems slip in on gentle breezes but leave the reader wind-slapped, awakened in body and spirit. We feel these poems and trust the poet's urging to "get out and love the world, take the road/west, cross the known's edge, and trust/it isn't all war zone, this flesh."
-Heidi Seaborn, author of An Insomniac's Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe and Give a Girl Chaos
Learning to Hold is a breathtaking collection that can be best described in Myers' own powerful words as "History held in raised hands, winces, / flinches, and those strange-lit dreams." These poems take us on a journey, from the trauma endured by the poet's ancestors in Eastern Europe through their flight across the water and into the present moment of delving into the ways where we come from haunt wherever we are. It is a collection that acknowledges profound, continual loss, "Someone's gone. Sunset's own wings / open to the edge of the world..." and yet the poems rise out from despair with perseverance, or dare I even say hope, reminding us, "You'll go on."
-Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of The Many Names for Mother and 40 WEEKS