Hold Your Own

Nikki Wallschlaeger

Hold Your Own is a steadfast search for peace, self-acceptance, and pleasure in a world that makes those basic rights an everyday challenge for Black women. Through her signature blend of sharp social critiques and tender lyric supplications, Nikki Wallschlaeger plumbs the depths of emotional experience with fearless agency and exciting poetic experimentation. She brings the public into the personal and vice versa, intimately revealing—like a live wire into the soul—a singular entity, a person, profoundly impacted by family, community, nation, and world.

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ISBN: 9781556596834

Format: Paperback

Manifesto

I’m putting this to paper before
I lose my nerve, my courage,
before this poem breaks from lies
& I have to part ways with you.
For I declare on this afternoon
it is my sacred right to be loved
gently & serenely, yes I said it,
I’m asking for it right now,
on my knees in the failing city.
I ask for common lovers to persist,
I want human hope to survive,
shaking open yr ragged vault
until the last brutal injustice exits
all nests of the lonely, weeping
like extinct birds, at the divine gates
of a paradise that deceives no one.
I take back the right to love myself
Completely. Amen.

About the Author

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Brick, American Poetry Review, Witness, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Waterbaby (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), Houses (Horseless Press 2015), and Crawlspace (Bloof 2017), as well as the graphic book I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (2019) from Bloof Books. She is also the author of an artist book called “Operation USA” through the Baltimore-based book arts group Container, a project acquired …

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Reviews

“In this self-reflective and candid fourth collection, Wallschlaeger explores the Black female experience in formally varied poems (crisp couplets, prose poems, and some that use caesuras and white space) to powerfully parse the layers of past experiences and the injustices of modern life. . . . Amid difficult reckonings with race and gender, Wallschlaeger delivers a memorable work that honors resilience.” —Publishers Weekly

“The poet gifts us meditative reminders that accountability, resistance, empathy, grace and peace, can coexist together. We can, and must, hold them all on our own.” —F.M. Papaz, Poetry Society of New York

“Nikki Wallschlaeger further proves herself as a singular poet of astonishing emotional depth and formal range. Hold Your Own is a steadfast search for peace, self-acceptance, and pleasure in a world that makes those basic rights an everyday challenge for Black women.” —Madison Bookbeat, WORT