How We Hold On - Poetry by Karren LaLonde Alenier

Publication Date: April 15, 2021
Paperback, 104 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-80-9

Available from Small Press Distribution

The title of Karren Alenier’s new collection, how we hold on, seems especially timely, appearing at the end of a year of pandemic dislocations. But though Covid does make an appearance here, her themes are far broader, timeless and universal: how we love, how we deal with loss, how we find our place in the world, how we relate to family and heritage, all topics to which she attends. In the poem “Homecoming” Alenier writes of the Greek word parea, for which there is no exact English equivalent, a term for a group of friends who delight in one another’s company, for the joy of sharing experiences: “how / most importantly we can love / and help each other through /
celebration / and sorrow.” In a very real sense, this collection is her invitation for us to join her parea, and to share in her celebrations and her sorrows.

She writes poignantly of her father and especially her “partygirl mother” who attempted to make “girl talk…with a daughter who read books she did not understand.” They and other family people the first two sections of the book. The third section, “when it drops you gonna feel it” takes place largely on Jamaica, a place dear to her and her late husband Jim (to whom the book is dedicated), for which reason it also has pride of place on the cover of the book.

In the final section, many poems are letters written to her “Zayde Isaac”, a great-grandfather who died in the previous pandemic of 1918, to whom she was introduced through keepsakes, eyeglasses and letters, “things a loving widow showed / a fiveyearold me”, with whom she now reaches a new understanding: “and now 2020 / year of perfect vision a new pandemic this / widow me /sees.” In the title poem, reflecting on the things her late mother and husband chose to keep closed away in chests, she writes,

in my chest an aging heart brims
with blood both beautiful and swift.

That blood courses through these pages, and they brim with life – with its celebration, and with its sorrow.


Praise for Karren LaLonde Alenier & how we hold on

Karren Alenier’s lively and courageous formal curiosity shapes her work into structures of confrontation and transformation, growing the poems in how we hold on across the personal and political landscape of a life fully lived.

—Annie Finch, author of The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells

Karren Alenier is a poetry marvel and a knower of the subtle practices of this art, its entangled associative sounds, its music of memory. Poems in her new collection, like “a walking bundle of frequencies” and “Sweetsop Bebop,” show her range and formal acuity. how we hold on dismantles time and form and reassembles the shattered bits into little broken sculptures of reality. But among the disrupted, disordered world depicted here also lie references to the Great Bell Chant and the Oracle of Delphi suggesting a truth that is singing just below everything, hough outof earshot.

—David Keplinger, author of Another City

I really like Karren Alenier’s voice in how we hold on. There is a fineness of feeling and a quick intelligence at work here. These skillfully crafted poems are a joy to read.

—Lorna Goodison, Poet Laureate of Jamaica

Karren LaLonde Alenier is the author of seven previous collections
of poetry, including The Anima of Paul Bowles, which the Grolier Bookstore of Boston featured as a 2016 staff pick. Looking for Divine Transportation won the 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature. Her poetry and fiction have been published in such magazines as Mississippi Review, Jewish Currents, and Gargoyle.

Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, her jazz opera with composer
William Banfield and Encompass New Opera Theatre artistic director Nancy Rhodes premiered at New York City’s Symphony Space Leonard Nimoy Thalia in June 2005. She is currently collaborating with composer Janet Peachey and director Nancy Rhodes on What Price Paradise, the love story of Jane and Paul Bowles.

For Scene4 Magazine, she writes feature articles, interviews, an arts blog called The Dressing, and a monthly column on Gertrude Stein and the arts. She is author of The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas, a book about contemporary opera. She also writes film reviews for CultureVulture.net.

She is a graduate of the University of Maryland College Park in French language and literature and a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Since 1986, she has worked in a leadership role with the literary nonprofit The Word Works, promoting contemporary American poetry. She enjoys spending time with her New Jersey-based son, daughter-in-law, and two grandsons. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.