Our Hands Hold Violence

“While it is common practice to say about debut collections that they hard-hit, breath-take, and stun, such hype would not, in this case, be at all hyperbolic. With Our Hands Hold Violence, Kieron Walquist has written not only one of the best debuts but one of the best collections, period, of the last several years, and in doing so joins an exciting new vanguard in American poetry.”
—John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry: Poems

“Kieron Walquist’s poems are thrilling. He yokes together violences and intimacies, arranges language into dazzling and resonant patterns, and breaks open memory to release music that’s torqued and incandescent. This music is queer, rooted in Missouri, and announces the arrival of a voice that sings to and against the place that birthed it.”
—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

Kieron Walquist (he/they) is a queer neurospicy poet + visual artist from mid-Missouri. Their work appears in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, IHLR, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Third Coast, Waxwing, + elsewhere. Their chapbook, Love Locks, was selected by Luther Hughes for the 2022 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest. He holds a BA from Lincoln University of Missouri, an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Monson Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Utah and lives in Salt Lake City.

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