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Left Bank Books Presents: Kieron Walquist
October 27, 2025 @ 6:00 pm
This reading will be held in-person at Left Bank Books, and also streamed live to Left Bank Book’s YouTube page.
Join us to help celebrate Kieron Walquist for the release of Our Hands Hold Violence: Poems, a National Poetry Series winner selected and with a forward by Brenda Hillman. This collection of poems explores rural Missouri, violence, queer desire / intimacy, addiction, familial and wildlife relationships.
“Kieron Walquist’s poems are thrilling. He yokes together violences and intimacies, arranges language into dazzling and resonant patterns, and breaks open memory to release music that’s torqued and incandescent. This music is queer, rooted in Missouri, and announces the arrival of a voice that sings to and against the place that birthed it.” – Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
EVENT INFO
- Books available from Left Bank Books
- Curbside pick-up, in-store pick-up, and shipping available
- RSVP is encouraged
ABOUT THE BOOK
OUR HANDS HOLD VIOLENCE: POEMS
Through encounters with the everyday beauty and brutality so much a part of rural and urban Missouri, Our Hands Hold Violence explores what it means to experience and/or perpetuate small and significant acts of violence, toward others and the self.
What does it mean to hunt (be hunted), haunt (be haunted), and other (be othered)? Abiding by a chronological arc told in four movements ( HERE, THERE, TOGETHER, ALONE), OHHV follows the speaker(s) as they come up in the Show Me State and come to terms with queerness, mental disability, addiction, and loneliness in the largely Christian, conservative, and hyper-masculine landscape.
ABOUT THE POET
KIERON WALQUIST (he/they) is a queer neurospicy poet + visual artist from mid-Missouri. Their work appears in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, IHLR, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Third Coast, Waxwing, + elsewhere. Their chapbook, Love Locks, was selected by Luther Hughes for the 2022 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest. He holds a BA from Lincoln University of Missouri, an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Monson Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Utah and lives in Salt Lake City.
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