All That Keeps Me by Tracy Rice Weber

Artists speak of negative space as an important part of any composition. In 1819, Keats wrote about how “straining against particles of light in the midst of a great darkness…is the very thing in which consists poetry.” Poets are thus familiar with the power of the via negativa— the white space surrounding words, the silences between passages, are never empty. Rather, by turns they shimmer and bristle with the enormity of the unsaid. It takes not only skill but also great love and courage to write toward those places where a wound has been inflicted, whether in the aftermath of family tragedy or of the world’s larger raft of trauma. In the poems of Tracy Rice Weber, we find a poet gifted with such a generous capacity for tenderness, and one who shows us how the careful carpentry of words not only builds or mends, but also allows even the joints and hasps to sing.
–Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts & Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia 2020-22

In Tracy Rice Weber’s All That Keeps Me, the ordinary is made luminous. Fireflies, sand dunes, daffodils, brown bags and buckshots, all matter of making and unmaking, are turned over in new light. Here, hands are “tools, not ornaments” fit for use and usefulness. They salvage and mourn, for some, they wither. For others, hands become distant memory, like the rest of the worn body, undone. Giving words to the wordless and grace to what’s mostly overlooked, Rice Weber’s poems herald the gods of all comfort: nameless saints staving off empty cupboards, protecting heirlooms, allowing for grocery store reverie. The poet feels what so many feel when threading the difficult stitch of family: “There/ are fathers and mothers for every/ space left in me.” And a child’s wonder, when does it turn? What a burden love is, this fear we all collect of losing what we most want to hold. This work is a record and recollection, a timeless desire, to burrow into the minutia of our living, and come back with something to show for it.

–Remica Bingham-Risher, author of What We Ask of Flesh and Starlight & Error 

“In All That Keeps Me, Tracy Rice Weber makes visible ‘the gray geometry’ of sorrow. Rooted in the restless intimacies of the familial, her poems don’t flinch——her clear-eyed language brings us close to the pain and to the tenderness. What wounds also tethers. Rice Weber’s poems—beautiful, resonant— will stay with me for a long time.”

–Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

A stunning chaplet that trills in a space of honest vibration between the feral and the domestic. In soft brilliance, link by link, here is a chain of history that breaks the reader over and again. Every time I return to this manuscript the reservoir of its detail fills an entire world’s worth of sound, image, and the infinite minutiae of life that would spear our imaginations. Here are poems that do the hard work of dying. Here are poems that blaze up, afire, with what it is to be human. This is poetry that reaches. All That Keeps Me will seize you with its beauty, unfettered as the wind.

–Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, author of Dēmos