For the poet, no skill is more of service than observation—what is there, what once was and will be, where love left a mark. In this regard, Robert Fanning looks up to very few.”
—Foreword Reviews
“All We Are Given We Cannot Hold is generous unto overflowing, with approaches to language that are at times visionary and towering, at others, intimate, tender, and elegiac, all during this ‘season of erasure’ and desolation, especially as he loses his extraordinary mother, ‘her belly,’ he writes of her, ‘my first sky.’ Fanning’s images are rich from his immersion in the natural world, images that evoke tenderness, but also violent beauty. Fanning’s awe is intense, as is his pain, which he conveys to the reader with urgency. For Fanning, the life force is what yearns.”
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry
"A gorgeous work of gratitude and grief, full of odes and elegies written by one whose life’s work is, yes, the lyric but also love. These poems ache with tenderness and exactitude in equal measure; Robert Fanning’s sharp eye—for social and political dynamics, for complicated human nature, for the shadow and the seed—is matched by his gentle touch, the generosity with which he regards his flawed and flailing fellow travelers."
—Melissa Crowe, author of Lo and Dear Terror, Dear Splendor
"There is so much to praise about this book, Fanning’s fifth, so where to begin such singing? ... Every Robert Fanning poem is a deep dive into the human heart. The losses here run deep, both the private and public. But it’s what the poet calls 'the love between us' that saves us and teaches us how to live. There is no other way to say it: I was heart-ravaged by this book. Ready for your own heart to be ripped apart. Fanning’s own heart leads the way into piecing it and us, his readers, back together."
—Peter Markus, author of When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds
"In his resigned and comforting voice Fanning, whether focused on a viral video, death bed, or bottle spun for a kiss in the basement after school, affirms the constancy of love while threats lurk—but where?"
—Jack Ridl, author of All At Once and Practicing to Walk Like a Heron
"In Fanning’s All We Are Given We Cannot Hold, he takes on the familiar world where one goes to driver’s ed, out to eat at restaurants, watches Shark Week. But what does the daily become when faced with a mother’s dying, a child’s pain? Because the act of a poem can undo the ordinary to reveal, Fanning recreates the dissociative leaps of grief and going forward, flipping the familiar into the unfamiliar, as the world becomes when faced with loss. But one must go on ahead bravely amid the daily beauty and strange music that can heal, even if it seems unsayable, underneath this language there is a light, as if 'a fold of silence where words once were, the way a veil of clouds reveals the momentary stars.'”
—Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys
“Fanning’s poems have an uncanny ability to sing their way into your heart, then break it wide open. This transcendent collection is a culmination of that power — flush with hymns of ache, outrage and awe for a world that is 'always falling away.' Fanning does it all with exceptional tenderness, while showcasing a deft mastery of music, language and form. Again and again, he reminds us that 'Nothing this astonishing ever holds.' But when you read these poems, it will.”
—Christina Kallery, author of Adult Night at Skate World
