Hand to Hand

The Orphan in the Line

Welcome. If you are here, you found one of my pieces. Someone handed it to you, or you came across it somewhere, and you followed it back. I am glad you did.

Before I tell you what this is, it helps to start with how it began, because it was not always this way, and that is the part worth holding onto.

For most of my life I have been making poems and pictures, and for a long time I did what you are supposed to do with them. I sent them out. I waited. Every so often a poem would land in a literary journal, tucked somewhere in the middle of a hundred and fifty pages, and I would feel good about it for a day or two and then watch it go quiet.

A poem in a journal like that is a little like an orphan. It stands in a long line of other orphans, each one looking up at whoever walks past, hoping to be the one who gets taken home. See me, it says. See me. Most of the time nobody does. The work shows up, a few people nod, and then it slips back into all the noise.

When the Work Had Room

But there was a time when this country made room for the work, real room, every single day. A hundred years ago a city like Des Moines was thick with painters and writers, and almost every good-sized town had four or five daily papers all going at once. The New York World, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Cleveland Press, the San Francisco Call-Bulletin. Papers like those ran poems and pictures right alongside the news, every day, as if a drawing mattered as much as the weather. And the paper itself was something you held in your two hands and carried around and slid across the table to somebody else. It went hand to hand. Those days are long gone now, and a great deal of noise rushed in to take their place.

What the Feed Does

Most of what we read and look at now reaches us through a screen, through a feed that decides what we see and what we never get the chance to. The feed is not cruel about it. It is just built to keep us moving, to hand us the next thing and the next, whatever is quick and easy and already familiar. The slow work, the strange work, the work that asks you to sit still for a minute, tends to drift to the bottom where almost no one finds it.

Here is the part that stays with me. What gets the most attention is hardly ever the thing that means the most, and a screen has no way of telling the two apart. It was never made to. So a poem can show up in the morning and be gone by the afternoon, scrolled past, shrunk down, counted but never really met.

You can be seen by a thousand people and still not be read by one.

What Hand to Hand Is

Hand to Hand is the small thing I decided to do about all of it. The name is the whole idea. It steps away from the screen and back into a room, into a hand. Instead of posting my work, I give it away. Each piece is something you can actually hold, a folded poem, a little zine, a small framed print. You can keep it, or pass it along to someone else, or lose it in a drawer for a year and find it again by accident. There are no links and no likes, nothing to click, nothing keeping track of you, and nothing I want back. What it is worth has nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with the quiet moment when it reaches one person.

What Folding Taught Me

I have been working this way for a while now. I fold small poetry zines by hand, one at a time, and let them move out into the world on their own. Doing that taught me something I did not see coming. When you hold a poem in your hands, the whole thing changes. You slow down. It becomes private, yours for a minute. The poem stops shouting to be noticed and simply asks to be read. It is not an orphan in a long line anymore, hoping a stranger will glance its way. It is already home, right there in your hands.

A Choice I Keep Making

Hand to Hand will not fix anything. It is far too small for that, and I have made my peace with that. It is just a choice I keep making. To share instead of sell. To show up instead of show off. To put the work in someone’s hands, the way it used to be, instead of throwing it into the feed and hoping.

Chris Leibow

Salt Lake City 2026