Held

Reviews / Votes

Nuernberger preaches the 'aesthetics of salvage' tenderly in this collection of lyric essays. This book showcases a poet and scholar's heart on the road, in an effort to hold 'increasingly fragile ecosystems together' in the face of tragedy. Held is a meditation on grief, and the tendrils of time, an exploration of how we are connected to all that has been and will be.
-Kao Kalia Yang, author of Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

"Held: Essays in Belonging is a masterpiece of close observation, surveying the natural world, the author's vulnerability, and the grief we all bear, with startling intimacy. Held is a whir, a song, a pulse, a buzz of language and empathy. Kathryn Nuernberger's use of the flash form in these meticulously researched yet deeply personal essays is magnificent."
-Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer

"I am always excited when a new book by Kathryn Nuernberger comes into the world, because her writing always expands my sense of possibility, connection, curiosity, and inquiry. Brave without bravado, vulnerable without pulling for pity, smart without arrogance, the essays of Held are prose poems that invite us to walk alongside Nuernberger's search for 'creatures who need each other, who know how to need each other' and also 'parasites, who haven't figured out yet what they can offer in return.' In honest reckonings with eco-grief and how that entwines with the social failures of racism and our care for those who struggle with mental health, Held is ultimately a book that seeks to see how we might better hold each other and this one, beautiful, beleaguered world."
-Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry


"[R]eading this book made me feel seen, understood. Nuernberger is grappling with the life and death questions we all have to contend with, and while she doesn't hold up an answer, in the search we find the connection. She shows us proof in the mutualism of tiny creatures that sustain each other - even if there is no greater meaning, no higher power, no inherent destiny or fate, there is this undisputable symbiotic relationship between living things."
-Hippocampus Magazine