vine, jade: Hold Me

Split/Lip Press, paperback

Publication Date: November 19, 2024

Publisher Marketing: 

The bedroom, the dinner party, the school grounds, the college queer collective, and the new city become grounds for critical and affective investigation in the essays of jade vine’s Hold Me as they draw upon movement, continuously shaped and shifted, both as a physical phenomena and a sensual truth, to meditate on desire, loneliness, and grief and all their achingly brilliant manifestations.

In haunting lyric essays, jade writes openly about their family and how certain identities complicate their relationship to them. Multiple voices—absent lovers and parents, friends who continue to dead-name—manifest grief and loneliness as much as desire and joy. jade revisits and inhabits Punjabi folklore, alongside their own personal stories, and holds out a hand of reassurance even through their own uncertainty. A history of longing and yearning, Hold Me moves through doom fest after doom fest to assemble memories, chains of afterimages, and a register of metaphors as jade re-enacts their own life, uncomfortable and beautiful and razor-sharp.