how to hold a pebble

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“How to Hold a Pebble is a work of remarkable intellect. With empathy and playfulness, with startle and delight, Jaspreet Singh explores the fragility, beauty, and sorrow of the dreaming and waking worlds. These poems will continue to toll inside you. At times, they will turn you inside out.” 

—Donna Kane, author of Orrery, 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award finalist 

“As Rilke’s archaic torso was to Modernism, so is Jaspreet Singh’s pebble to our late-Anthropocene literary moment. Instead of beholding the high, White ideal of ‘pure’ stone, we must hold the earthy, water-worn pebble. It may or may not be too late to change our lives; still, we must take the pebble in hand, steward what remains of the multifarious planet Singh both mourns and celebrates. The poems keen and dance—and amazingly, offer comfort. Humor resides here, in the polyphonic play within and among languages, as well as vital guidance: ‘It [is]/impossible/to go back/the same way/we . . . entered’; ‘Keep creating disorder, live, do not simply versify the rhetoric of empire.’” 

—Natania Rosenfeld, author of Wild Domestic and The Blue Bed 

“Jaspreet Singh distills, reveals and honors our complex relationship with the planet, from habitation to occupation, from the exquisite to the aching. His poems are mercurial and revelatory, and are always things of deep beauty.” 

—Anne Kennedy, author of The Sea Walks into a Wall and The Darling North 

“For those paying attention, Singh demonstrates the monumental task of mindfulness. He enacts the quiet appreciation of a pebble while facing up to the tragedies we have made of the world. Through lenses of science, art, and history, he stares down colonialism’s aftermath, environmental breakdown, and the collapse of intimacy. Despite often wishing to forget, this thoughtful poet holds to the necessity of being ‘a believer / in the task of witnessing.’ Like him, we must resist the urge to blink.” 

—John Barton, author of We Are Not Avatars and Lost Family 

PUBLISHER

NeWest Press