HOLD EVERYTHING
“Moving freely among subjects including technology, politics, the natural world, and memory, Gibson animates his poems with epiphanies both large and small, all made possible by his fine-tuned observation and humor… This surprising collection shines.” —Publishers Weekly, ⭐Starred Review⭐
“A dazzlingly composed and profound meditation on time, persistence, and the kind of transcendence that can fit inside an ordinary human life.”—2025 Four Quartets Prize Judges’ Citation
“Wading through time, realism, and everyday demands, Dobby Gibson’s newest collection is crisp and delightfully strange, equally inviting and bewildering.”—Only Poems magazine
"With humor and existential urgency, Hold Everything makes visible all the questions that carry us forward better attuned to the moment we are living. Gibson possesses a sizzling, quick-fire imagination." —Major Jackson
“Gibson’s a poet I never tire of hearing: The more of his work I read the more I want to read… He could even be the voice of my generation, if my generation had a beautiful voice.” —Stephanie Burt
“Every poem in this book tells me something I don’t know, or something I’m always in need of being reminded… Gibson’s Hold Everything shows us what it might mean if only we could hold everything we need to survive, love, and thrive. I love this book.” —Dara Barrois/Dixon
LITTLE GLASS PLANET
“Gibson is masterful with imagery. [His] writing is smart and crisp.” —Elisabeth Lund, The Washington Post
“Exuberant, electric, and frank.” —BuzzFeed Favorite Books of Spring 2019
“[These] poems are stinging, exceedingly perceptive and, most of all, insistent that there is still a grace to be found in the world, if one is willing to see it.” —Shelf Awareness, starred review
“Charmingly funny.”—Publishers Weekly
“Idiosyncratic and memorable, Gibson’s poetry will reward readers even through its moments of anguish.”—Library Journal
“Poems are thoughtful and humble. Some are not easy. All are worth reading.”—The St. Paul Pioneer Press
“It’s the kind of poetry every generation may need.”—Stephanie Burt, Rain Taxi Review
“It’s clear to me why we love to read him —word choice, tone, wonder, plus sweet bemusement.”—Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
“There is nothing like reading poems by Dobby Gibson. No one else writes with such irresistibly odd and goofy generosity, such humble intelligence, such playful, painful, and hilarious compassion. I greet each new book by him with delicious anticipation, saying, first to myself and then to anyone who will listen, this is his best one yet, and here I am doing it again.”—Matthew Zapruder
It Becomes You
2013 Believer Book Award Finalist
2014 Minnesota Book Award Finalist
"Poems of grace and invention. . . . In Gibson’s hands the lyric form becomes enlivened. This is his most generous and assured volume to date." — The Believer
“Gibson got noticed for his first two books, which combined a sparky, bizarre postsurrealism with an understated, familiar sadness. This third outing might be his best.” — Publishers Weekly
“Deftly quilts witty observation with moments of lyric intensity.”— Minneapolis Star Tribune
SKIRMISH
2010 Minnesota Book Award Finalist
“Poems hum with gloomy humor and the mood of pregnant anticipation one finds in a Paul Auster novel. Gibson is no escapist, though, portraying an anxious America in the new millennium.” — Publishers Weekly
“[Readers] expect not only to be moved but to have a little fun… [Gibson] understands this. In his second book, Skirmish, he shakes the reader at every turn.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A smart, clever, pyrotechnical book.” — The Rumpus
POLAR
2004 Beatrice Hawley Award (Alice James Award)
2006 Minnesota Book Award Finalist
“I have read few more quotable first books … Polar is friendly, yearning, observant, immediately winning and witty.” — Stephanie Burt, Yale Review
“Teems with a language so alive and so imaginative that one cannot help but read on with wonder and rapture.” — Bloomsbury Review
"Gibson often reminds us that the seemingly illogical leaps the imagination makes can many times push out into deeper emotional territory."―Gulf Coast