Hold It Down by Gina Myers
Hold It Down by Gina Myers, graduate, the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School.
Coconut Books, 2013
Gina Myers’s aptly-named Hold It Down chronicles the endless effort to keep a lid on hope, that feathered thing that must be denied so the rent can be paid. Everything else Pandora’s box let loose has hung around — boredom, sickness, loneliness — but if hope gets out, it gets away. Moving among Brooklyn, Saginaw, and Atlanta, with a soundtrack looping Otis Redding and Johnny Cash, these poems forgo hipster irony for genuine dismay with consumerism, war, and others of the world’s ills. Myers’s lines break like hearts. Let her speak plainly to you: ‘This is my life, / this is my life.’” —Evie Shockley