Hold Me

The bedroom, the dinner party, the school grounds, the college queer collective, and the new city become grounds for critical and affective investigation in the essays of jade vine's Hold Me as they draw upon movement, continuously shaped and shifted, both as a physical phenomena and a sensual truth, to meditate on desire, loneliness, and grief and all their achingly brilliant manifestations.

In haunting lyric essays, jade writes openly about their family and how certain identities complicate their relationship to them. Multiple voices-absent lovers and parents, friends who continue to dead-name-manifest grief and loneliness as much as desire and joy. jade revisits and inhabits Punjabi folklore, alongside their own personal stories, and holds out a hand of reassurance even through their own uncertainty. A history of longing and yearning, Hold Me moves through doom fest after doom fest to assemble memories, chains of afterimages, and a register of metaphors as jade re-enacts their own life, uncomfortable and beautiful and razor-sharp.

Praise for Hold Me:

"Within its deceptively spare 148 pages, Hold Me contains an electrifying multiplicity of novel forms, spanning the lyric to the diagnostic, the ghost note to the terminally online, each in their own way unlocking extraordinarily intimate access to the dysmorphic effects of the many different modes of love and longing on memory and body over a lifetime in midst of bloom. jade vine is locked in, a strident voice worth sitting up for."
-Blake Butler, author of Molly

"In Hold Me, jade vine writes, 'I could've invented yearning if Sappho hadn't already, ' and I believe it. Each lyric essay is heavy with loneliness and inescapable distance-between lovers, family, the dead and the living, and the sacred and the everyday. vine implores us to pay attention as we move through the strange liminal space of this collection: 'Look with me or at me, I do not care as long as you look.' I honestly can't look away."
-Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck

"There's a thickness to vine's writing, the way your tongue feels after you've had a mouth full of blood. vine plays curiously with the viscera of memory, openly and without inhibition, willing to be vulnerable to the often knotty places this leads: the weight of trauma both endured and caused by parents; how the mind and heart prepare for the grief of the death of a loved one or the death of love requited; the regret over the worst of our choices that we can never unmake.

In Hold Me, jade vine shows us that to be held is to be nourished in the soft candlelight of another's affirmation. To be told without words, I am here, and I am with you, the real you. And vine exposes us to the experience of abandonment in that most tender moment, when the human heart needs that affirmation most, as a frightened child, as a grieving adult, as a lonely shade othered and made invisible simply for being queer in a bigoted world.

Hold Me reminds us of the act of embrace that is absolving others on the path to self-forgiveness. It laments, via horoscopes and unsent text messages, asking - how do you unlearn cruelty when you have known it so intimately?"
-Robin Sinclair, author of Someone Else's Sex