Atypical in the most literal sense, Our Hands Hold Violence, Kieron Walquist's National Poetry Series-winning debut, is full of nonce forms, single-use as a condom. Several are neatly tabular, while others remind you of etched metal or a tall stalk of hogweed along the roadside. Abecedarians, too, on everything from an attic of “Bats caught down eave[, . . .] gone hush in June’s knifing light,” to RollerCoaster Tycoon, where a virtual tyrant might work the park’s “janitors to death / Emptying trash + erasing the pixelated vomit” or leave its nauseated “patrons lost on the / Very corners of the virtual landscape.” It doesn’t take a doctorate in psychology to understand why a child, playing god in some disconnected patch of rural Missouri, would choose to reproduce the material conditions of their own life. In the special hindsight of nostalgia and artistry, industrial ugliness has much beauty—though anyone who has driven through the Bible belt could tell you so. Here, even the depressing is at least memorably said.

Take the plainspoken sonics of the opening poem—“Hometown,” apt for a beginning—with its effortlessly rounded vowels:

The collection’s most visually conspicuous poem, about hunting deer as a teenager, consists of spiral lines that start with a bite from a recoiling rifle (“Which is to say: you shot yourself and lived”) and in the end recall a bloodied kaleidoscope. Or, what is a firearm if not handheld violence?

Though Walquist’s title certainly risks what Ezra Pound called mixing an abstraction with the concrete—Pound’s example, in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” was “dim lands of peace”—a glance at publishers’ catalogs would suggest it’s in good company. Notwithstanding some boxy collages, including a reference to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, sticker pieces from the McDonald’s Monopoly game, and black clip art that could be out of Man and His Symbols, one of the more interesting quirks in Our Hands Hold Violence is Walquist’s substitution of the plus sign (“+”) for the conjunctive “and,” interesting to the extent that it brings to mind class difference (“Booze-wah you’d laugh”). Compared with the fancy ampersand, resembling a cutting of ribbon somebody dropped or the filigree on an antebellum courthouse, the plus sign is decidedly blue-collar, like a cross of welded aluminum left in a cemetery; ditto Walquist’s use of angular brackets over the gentler, hugging curves of parentheses. It’s hard not to think that what these stylistic tics spell out is the author’s distrust of connection, bled into his semantics. Yet equally telling, or nearly, is the book’s abundance of hyphens.

As with dissolving medical sutures, orthographically a hyphen associates words long enough that they eventually fuse. This makes sense, given the diverse injuries and slow-to-heal wounds in Our Hands Hold Violence. But pain has its pleasures, as when in the bed of a pickup truck filled with water—that is, a hillbilly swimming pool—Walquist, sitting “crisscross-applesauce, [. . .] screamed + shivered, / sliced open / with such incredible joy.” In between hints of what once was (“arrowheads glint—intense as an ice rink”), there is also the violence concomitant with single-family farming: the wood chipper that “will confetti cedar” and occasionally backfire as it “hack[s] smoke from sap,” the rotary mower that once decapitated a rabbit. In youth, every accident is a tragedy and thus more sharply felt. A boy takes a bottle rocket to the face; a fox is gutted on a stone altar. (As the older Pip explains in Great Expectations, “It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small.”) After nearly drowning, Walquist describes being pulled out of the water “like a bicycle.” It’s a terrific simile that captures both the human body's weight and awkward slack, whereas the question as to what one is supposed to be—first asked by a crack addict on Halloween, then the wider universe of family and friends—remains in suspension.

Since Reconstruction and late into the twentieth century, the socioeconomic well-being of the South has trended downward, like industrial sludge meeting a freshwater lake. In contrast to Kai and Anders Carlson-Wee, whose impoverishment and accounts of scrounging for food constitute a lifestyle—one undertaken, it must be said, on a privileged, vagabondish whim (the third brother, Olaf, is a cryptocurrency billionaire)—Walquist’s recollection of climbing into dumpsters alongside his kid sisters, who themselves color with embarrassment, has the stamp of desperation, spying an opened cantaloupe or a moldy loaf of rye bread. The comment, movingly subtle, is that children ought to be playing with actual crayons, not digging through food every shade of the rainbow. (Incidentally, Our Hands Hold Violence has the generous dimensions of an activity book, which may have kept the page count to respectable sub-100 territory.) Further on, we learn that a smoldering house is an opportunity to salvage “useable pots / + pans, copper wire, / anything worthwhile,” with the arsonist's motive said to be either drug-related or that a spouse found her husband in bed with a male lover.

Throughout the book, the prompting of queer desire is constant, whether by “men // in baseball caps + cutoff tees / who javelin branches,” shuffling through a not-quite-haunted farmhouse and corn maze, hands on one another’s hips, or underwear models in K-mart with their anonymous sun-kissed torsos. (You’d almost think you were reading Rilke: Du mußt . . . dir etwas kaufen.) Exercising in the basement alongside another shirtless teenager, of course transformation is inherently erotic. Heartache, like “a hundred mirrors broken,” or a mirror broken into a hundred pieces, expresses itself haltingly with vertical bars, the effect such that Walquist’s poetry manages to enjamb and run on at the same time:

Like Humpty Dumpty, who, “taken down[, must be] put back together,” or a giant robot possessing a “dented head / with autistic software,” few of us are of our own making.

Amusing oneself however one can, the spectrum of entertainment would seem to run from urban exploration, visiting a dilapidated prison covered in edgy graffiti and a snowdrift of what is guessed to be asbestos, to the question of sex, when life for a would-be poet was still more Van Halen than Helen Vendler:

Despite Walquist’s traumatized admission that he “will always be / ten years old, wet + wounded,” at last Our Hands Hold Violence places its faith in change, the kind that would allow one to be talked down from a bridge high above the Missouri River, then add a lover’s padlock to that bridge without also tossing in the key, soaked to the bone and hanging on “until love / isn’t a chore.”