First Friday: Furious Flower Broadside Gallery Presents Be)Holding: Poems of Love & Loss

About the exhibit: Poems hold us. They hold our grief, our love. They hold spaces to find our way through all we have lost, all we will lose. They hold the pieces—of lives torn, of ourselves shattered. They hold our hurt alongside our hope, if not the whole, whatever may be gathered as a whole, including the dark as we find in TJ Jarrett’s “Ruin,” a poem featured in this exhibit. And poems hold the dead, as our dreams often do, if only momentarily as in Natasha Trethewey’s “Myth,” also included in the exhibit. Do poems hold death itself? Perhaps so, or at least “what it’s like,” as Ai tell us in “Conversation,” another featured poem. Each poem in this exhibit holds something so clear and horrible, we must ask along with Ai, “[c]ould anyone alive survive it?” While poems can hold such things, we also hold poems, or behold them. They are often before our eyes—in our hands sometimes, on a screen, or, say, on a gallery wall. If we look closely, we might see in them “the beauty / Of our own eyes,” words we find in Jericho Brown’s “Colosseum,” also part of the exhibit. As you move through the exhibit, I invite you to take a moment to hold each poem in your clearest vision. Look at the poems looking back at you. Look at them looking beyond you. Behold and be held.

All First Friday receptions at Furious Flower Broadside Gallery are free and open to the public. Light refreshments are provided.