Bøker utgitt av First Matter Press

This collection documents a selection of the creative works generated at Poetry Scramble and features new work from 16 of First Matter Press's legacy editors, authors, and artists. Inside you'll find community-crafted erasures, exquisite corpse, human magnetic poetry, Mad Libs-style poems, centos, and collages, plus new writing and art from: Rae Diamond, ash good, Lauren Paredes, Jessica E. Pierce, Emily Moon, Rachel Mulder, Xylophone Mykland, Lara Rouse, Hailey Spencer, Sara Swoboda, Andra Vltavín, Dan Wiencek, Caroline Wilcox Reul, Sonya Wohletz, Charity E. Yoro, and ahuva s. zaslavsky.

floating bones dives into the traumas of homelessness, heartbreak, and loneliness through the creative processes of writing and drawing, meditation, and observing the natural world. The result is an elixir of healing and reconnection."Rae Diamond's collection shows how reality, even belonging, is 'poised for adaptation.' With exquisite form that turns language into sleight of hand, this genre-defying work shook all the language in my body until I was a collection of bones rattling in a jar and reminded me that home is nowhere and everywhere." -Corinne Manning, author of We Had No Rules"floating bones is a migratory almanac, a drifting and lyrical meditation on home and belonging. Built with poems of ineffable sonic awareness and tender, hand-drawn sketches, floating bones follows a narrator who has left one home for another, just to find that the new home is unlivable. floating bones is the sacred book by your bedside that you turn to before you sleep. In a time of housing crisis, environmental displacement and global uncertainty, Rae Diamond is a profound guide through the unknown future." -Ever Jones, author of the transliberatory lyric nightsong "Skillfully constructed poems abound with images that reference nature and mortality and musical language that compels: 'still outside in/twilight hush in/spiritshattter in/windstir in/awe a drifting/pool reflecting/the world back/to itself'. This book does, in fact, include a skeleton full of gorgeous and mysterious illustrations of found animal bones, deer hooves and antlers, and human teeth with wings. Diamond, an interdisciplinary artist, brings their practice in the visual arts, music, and performance to the work which creates a mesmeric experience for the reader." -Maw Shein Win, Storage Unit for the Spirit House"Here Rae (the healer behind the text of the wonderful Cantigee Oracle) frames space where paradox softens, outsung by a note that gathers all sounds into itself and rings out repair. The words do not struggle to replace the other in her diction; she works throughout with sous rature and grayed-out print. These and other names, notions, goads clash and chime, abide as in acoustic space . . . All bones are ear bones? Bone-deep, listen to Rae Diamond." -Erik Ehn, American Playwright

ten-cent flower & other territories explores what is lost in lineage, translation, transaction, and seeks reclamation through mapping. Through etymologies of place names and monuments and godheads to navigating complex geographies of mother/daughter, lover/other, colonizer/colonized; from ledger of transgressions to passage through birth canal, with quiet defiances against autocorrect, capitalization. It is a collection of constellation, origin story, futures, says author Charity E. Yoro about her debut poetry collection.ADVANCE PRAISE"Charity Yoro's poems astonish-carefully wrought yet equally wild. Navigating the tensions between beauty, commodity and place, they perform a richly textured quick-step that is bold, sly, funny, tender, fierce. But it is Yoro's dexterity and inventiveness with form that allows her work to be both a brilliant means as well as an outcome of exploration into personal and cultural trauma; expressed anger and restraint; loss and reclamation; the experience of time; aesthetics as a political act; invisibility and strength. These poems move in surprising ways, guided by an intelligence that is adept at making thinking a deeply emotional and sensuous act." -Michele Glazer"Charity E. Yoro's ten-cent flower & other territories sets the notion of Hawai'i as a 'taste of paradise' alongside the acknowledgment that this homeland is 'a museum of pretty / stolen things.' In this collection that is at once searing and tender, Yoro reckons with the effects of conquest and tourism on the islands, writing of and through erasure, interruption, and displacement. This question of legacies-what painful histories and what gifts the coming generations will inherit from us-is at the heart of ten-cent flower & other territories. Through poems that range in form from haiku to crosswords to abecedarian primers, Yoro asks us to consider the urgency of language: what words will offer those who come after us, and will these words tell the truth of our histories, in all their terrors and delights?" -Jennifer Perrine¿¿"In this astonishing achievement of a book, Charity Yoro expands the artistic repertoire of poetry with refreshing self-awareness, technical dexterity, and grace. Whether working in inherited forms, found forms, or invented ones, Yoro's writing is marked by a singularity of voice and vision. She is clearly a rising star in the contemporary literary landscape." -Kristina Marie Darling

"Electric . . . threaded with gods and angels, earthquakes and asteroids, and ever-present visitors from the kingdom Animalia. Like the many species of wasps that inhabit these pages, Pierce''s writing is attentive, sharp, and paper-winged. I was taken in by every atom of these poems, feeling, as I read, ''My heart catching / on all their hearts.''"-Brittney Corrigan, author of Daughters

"The poems in this elegant first collection are sonic maps, hieroglyphic whispers echoing the mysteries of the world before the world-those paradoxically partial and complete songs of the womb we all carry within our bodies. Gabby Hancher is tuned exquisitely to the loamy forests of human nature-specifically to the blood and soil of birth and sexual union wherein we ALL rediscover the sacral inside the erotic, and the corridor between the heart and the genitals. The poems are mantras invoking the link we know we have to the before of form and the inevitable afterwards, and in between those polarities-the absolute fact that we are one with the earth upon which we stand and one another regardless of gender, color or creed."-Holaday Mason, author of The Red Bowl

"In the first poem of this collection, Emily Moon shows us Weldon Kees at his typewriter, making art ''for a future that looks/as empty and bleak/asthe present''-thereby flashing Kees out of the mid-twentieth century into our time. Here are the haze of cigarette smoke, the taste of whiskey, jazz on the soundtrack, walk-ons by Pope Francis and Frida Kahlo, and locations chosen or invented by Moon, the poet-director. Here is her version of Kees'' shadow/symbol, the character Robinson, presented as an obsession. These poems about Kees offer mysteries, deeply appropriate for a man whose life story includes his sudden disappearance in 1955-a mystery still, serving here as a touchstone for Moon''s poetry."-Judith Arcana"Emily Moon''s debut explores a groundbreaking potential for mystery. Lines like, ''Sounds of the harbor clanked around us. / Salt breeze carried a tang of diesel / and sewage. / A clock chimed some ways off. / He checked his watch. Cinderella hour'' bring this poetical film noir to life. For the reader interested in both story and lyricism, it''s just you & me, miss moon is in a revelatory league of its own."-Hannah Beresford, Poetry Editor at No Tokens