Once You Had Hands

"You want to read these poems, consume them,
and rebuild the world because of them." 

-Crabfat Magazine

“Stunning language that is delicate and raw”

-Humanist Press

“Tasha Golden's Once You Had Hands is a smart and moving book of poetry. There is a fierce voice here that can make you feel danger without always naming it, and it is indeed a dangerous world that we meet here. Golden has sharp senses and wit in depicting her disappointment and fury at religious promises. There is joy here too, hard won, and quietly compelling.”

– Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Who Said and Doubt: A History

“This book is a feral cry that invents the only form that can contain it; it’s a cry embodied in and ennobled by art, which doesn’t dilute but enhances its power.  I am at a loss to describe, even from the outside, that power.  I can only urge you to read it.”
– James Cummins, author of Still Some Cake

“Domestic horrors are twisted into gorgeous sequined structures that in their artifice, their passionate madeness, remind us that purposeful transformation is possible.”
– Catherine Wagner, author of Nervous Device

“this furious book is…a work of graceful beauty. Interspersed with inspired manipulations of poems by the metaphysical Henry Vaughan, and the evocative photos of Michael Wilson, Golden’s work will stay with the reader for a long time.”
– Norman Finkelstein, author of Track

“One has the feeling that this clear-eyed writer set out to wield poems like glowing lanterns against a tide of darkness and loss, and finding she could not stem the tide, chose instead to illuminate the questions we are all too often afraid to ask. Turns out a writer with a nimble mind and enough courage can make the fearsome questions beautiful.”
– Linford Detweiler, Over the Rhine