Hold Your Own

In her fourth collection, Nikki Wallschlaeger further proves herself as a singular poet of astonishing emotional depth and formal range. Hold Your Own is a steadfast search for peace, self acceptance, and pleasure in a world that makes those basic rights an everyday challenge for Black women. Through her signature blend of sharp social critiques and tender lyric supplications, Nikki Wallschlaeger plumbs the depths of emotional experience with fearless agency and exciting poetic experimentation. She brings the public into the personal and vice versa, intimately revealing--like a livewire into the soul--a singular entity, a person, profoundly impacted by family, community, nation, and world.

And she does it all through staggeringly diverse approaches to writing. Whether excavating childhood injustices in probing prose sequences or crafting formally energized declarations that could be just as easily shouted as sung, Wallschalaeger proves, yet again, the multitudes of the self, how it can flourish in the face of all that tries to stymy it. The result is exhilarating resilience, love beating at the center of incredible strength.

Nikki Wallschlaeger (she/her) has authored four collections of poetry: Hold Your Own, Waterbaby, Crawlspace, and Houses. In addition to several chapbooks, she also wrote the graphic book I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (2019) and an artist book titled Operation USA through the Baltimore-based book arts group Container, a project acquired by Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. With a potentness that cuts right to the heart of matters, Wallschlaeger’s poetry is heavily informed by Black feminism and delves into themes of race, sexuality, gender, politics, and contemporary culture. She has previously served as the poetry editor of Protean Magazine and a visiting assistant professor of poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a lifelong resident of Wisconsin and currently lives in the Driftless region cataloging books at Metaphysical Graffiti.