Kieron Walquist & Lue Hughes, a poetry reading

Poets Kieron Walquist & Lue Hughes read from their work. Walquist is the author of Our Hands Hold Violence, a collection of poems and photographs that explores rural Missouri, violence queer desire/intimacy, addiction, familial and wildlife relationships. Hughes is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves, a stunningly cinematic collection in its layered portrayal of the never-ending dualities of a queer Black poet’s life in the city.

About Our Hands Hold Violence

A NATIONAL POETRY SERIES WINNER SELECTED AND WITH A FOREWORD BY BRENDA HILLMAN

Through encounters with the everyday beauty and brutality so much a part of rural and urban Missouri, Our Hands Hold Violence explores what it means to experience and/or perpetuate small and significant acts of violence, toward others and the self.

What does it mean to hunt (be hunted), haunt (be haunted), and other (be othered)? Abiding by a chronological arc told in four movements (HERE, THERE, TOGETHER, ALONE), Our Hands Hold Violence follows the speaker(s) as they come up in the Show Me State and come to terms with queerness, mental disability, addiction, and loneliness in the largely Christian, conservative, and hyper-masculine landscape. Other themes / aspects of note include familial dynamics, estrangement, labor, neglected and decaying natures, waste, and the confluence of wildlife and mankind.

Comprised of traditional forms and modes such as the abecedarian, ekphrasis, sestina, and more hybrid configurations (billboards, bullet points, McDonald’s Monopoly stickers), as well as photographs, Our Hands Hold Violence is interested, too, in changing/challenging structure and expectations. Thus, enacting a visual and figurative “violence” upon the page. Additionally, 2 poems are contained in a nonce (invented) form called “Shakes,” where strophes traverse between left and right points, while the middle column is constructed or cataloged by similar sounds—a form inspired by the author’s own reality of stimming (i.e. pacing) and echolalia.

Our Hands Hold Violence indulges in alliteration, assonance, repetition, and a colloquial registry of language. The voice(s) in the poems can range from anxious, reflective (nostalgic), sensual, and tender, but all are compelled by and circle the manuscript’s themes, which become obsessions. Hauntings. Ultimately, Our Hands Hold Violence is a collection troubled by the desire to belong to/in a place and to beloveds that have “been home” while, in ways, “feeling like an outsider” at home and within one’s local community.

About A Shiver in the Leaves

Nestled against the backdrop of Seattle's flora, fauna, and cityscape, Lue Hughes' debut poetry collection wrestles with the interior and exterior symbiosis of a gay Black man finding refuge from the threat of depression and death through love and desire.

Hughes draws readers into a Seattle that is heavily entrenched in violent anti-Blackness, and full of vulnerable and personal encounters from both the speaker’s past and present. With reverent and careful imagery, Hughes fashions deeply saturated, tender vignettes that reckon relationships between family and friends, lovers, nature, and the police-state.

A Shiver in the Leaves is stunningly cinematic in its layered portrayal of the never-ending dualities of a queer Black poet’s life in the city. Hughes's interrogation of selfhood renders a sharply intimate and viscerally powerful reimagining of what it means to be alive in a body, and what it can mean to live.

Kieron Walquist [he/they] is the author of Our Hands Hold Violence, a 2024 National Poetry Series winner. His other work appears in like a field, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, + elsewhere, + has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Monson Arts, + Vermont Studio Center. A PhD student at the University of Utah, he lives in Salt Lake City.

Luther “Lue” Hughes (she/her) is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves (BOA Editions, 2022), listed as best books of 2022 in The New Yorker, and the chapbook, Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), recommended by the American Library Association. She is the founder of Shade Literary Arts, an online platform for queer writers of color, cohosts The Poet Salon Podcast with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat, and serves as the Poetry Editor for CHUM News. Her honors include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Rosenberg Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, Cascade PBS’s Black Arts Legacies honoree, and named Most Influential by Seattle Magazine. Her writing has been published in The Paris Review, Orion, American Poetry Review, Seattle Met, and others. She’s been featured in The Seattle Times, ForbesWomen, Essence, KUOW Public Radio, and more. Lue lives in Seattle, where she was born and raised.

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