with/holding is a collection of genre-blurring poems that examines the representation and reproduction of Blackness across communication media and popular culture. Together, text and image call up a nightmarish and seemingly insatiable buzzing-clicking-scrolling-sharing appetite for a daily diet of Black suffering.

In this follow-up to her award-winning debut collection How She Read (2019), Gibson gives sombre voice to Nostalgia, "the signifying ache in search of its signified." A meditation on the rise of falling monuments, in the wake of Add to Cart consumer culture, this collection draws on the language of brand marketing, news and social media, DIY culture and graphic design--"the tyranny of copy and paste"--to confront the role of the new colonial machinery in the relentless consumption and commodification of Black bodies.

Drawing on icons past and present, this collection imagines Black voices moving freely across time and space: the hold of a 19th century slave ship diagram printed on a white rubber yoga mat; a whispering set of 1950s grinning salt 'n' pepper shakers on a Pinterest dinner table; ringside with wrestler Sweet Daddy Siki at 1970s Maple Leaf Gardens on YouTube; and the dissenting centre of the 2020 Black Square. In the journey from longing to belonging, with/holding disrupts the fetishizing algorithms that continue to reproduce Black pain, promote anti-Black racism, and reinforce white supremacy. As an act of protest, this collection imagines how to survive the unspeakable present. As an act of reclamation it seeks to build a meaningful connection to the past through transcending acts of resistance.

Chantal Gibson's profile page

• Long-listed, Raymond Souster Award - League of Canadian Poets

Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the unceded, traditional, ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by systemic cultural and institutional erasure. Her visual art has been exhibited in museums and galleries across Canada and the US, most recently in the Senate of Canada building in Ottawa.

Gibson's debut book of poetry, How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019), was the winner of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, a finalist for both the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize and the inaugural Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes. How She Read received second place for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry, and was longlisted for the Nelson Ball Poetry Prize, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award. Gibson's work has been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Literary Review of Canada, Room magazine and Making Room: 40 years of Room Magazine (Caitlin Press, 2017). It was longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry prize and shortlisted for PRISM magazine's 2017 Poetry Prize.

Recipient of the prestigious 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship, Gibson teaches writing and visual communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

“Chantal Gibson’s extraordinary and award-winning How She Read showed us how to look up close, to see what was always right in front of us. In with/holding Gibson pulls the lens even tighter on Blackness, on history, on culture, on media—on us. A gorgeous mapping of the relationship between technology and images, voice and power—some pages you won’t be able to turn, and others that will hold on to you. This is tremendous work. This is how we read.”

—Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days

“As an artist, Gibson engages with the concreteness of text, reminding us that meaning can also be made through the materiality of language itself.”

—Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Quill & Quire

“with/holding is stunningly bold in its jamming of the live feeds and undead archives of anti-Blackness. Cerebral, mischievous, and powerfully suffused with care, it is a rebellion against the relentless commodification, consumption, and co-opting of ongoing pain, against the cynical recognitions that foreclose and suspend justice. Chantal Gibson proves once again that she is an essential force in contemporary art.”

—David Chariandy, author of Brother and I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

“In with/holding, Chantal Gibson builds on the visual and semiotic wordplay that characterized How She Read, this time turning to the digital vocabularies of globalization and late capitalism, from Pinterest boards and online product listings to Instagram campaigns and YouTube comments sections. with/holding embeds the reader in the flattening aesthetics of the internet, where every expression of Black life is always already a meme waiting to be reprinted on a yoga mat. From within that space of endless mediation and remediation, with/holding constantly disrupts its own movement toward meaning or catharsis with the dehumanizing logics of the algorithm—whether through a pop-up ad interrupting a poem mid-stanza, or the dissolution of meaning as vowels drop away one by one. By turns heart-wrenching, scathing, and hilarious, the poems in with/holding refuse to stay still long enough to become consumable or meme-able.”

—Hannah McGregor, editor of Refuse: CanLit in Ruins

“Gibson writes through the abject commodification and consumption of Blackness in today’s society, without exploiting Black joy, pain, struggle, and love. She critiques the gross ways in which Black identity is capitalized upon while still making clear who this collection is for. with/holding is written to me—a Black woman—for me, and about me. But it is required reading for all, especially those who revel uncritically in the dated and diluted awokening of the last year. Through her wickedly incisive manipulation of familiar imagery and genres—online advertising, black squares, product descriptions, and corporate diversity statements—Gibson unsettles and unravels the absurdity and inhumanity of whitewashed nostalgia and reconstitutes Black history, presence, and untethered futures. As I read and re-read this text and absorb the images Gibson re/creates, I am enraged, inspired, in despair, and held—held in the space the poet has created for me to grieve, to yell, to rest, to fight unapologetically.”

—Ebony Magnus, Head Librarian SFU Belzberg and co-curator of the un/settled Project: Black Women, Art, Poetry & Place