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First Matter Press 2025 Book Launch
Join First Matter Press in celebrating the launch of their 2025 titles: The Dying Room by Annemarie Eayrs, Brava by Violeta Garza, first you must destroy the world by Claudia Saleeby Savage, and waling waling palpitations by nawa angel a.h. Covers feature art by Pearlyn Tan.
Readings begin at 6:00 p.m.
This event is free and open to the public.
The Dying Room, recipient of the 2025 Prima Materia First Chapbook Award, is a haunting and precise debut that navigates the shifting terrain of transracial adoption and identity. Moving between poetry and prose—told in fragments, crossings, and missing memories—Annemarie Eayrs crafts a lyric journey through dislocation, inheritance, and the slow, uncertain process of self-recognition. In these pages, the search for origin becomes both mythic and documentary—charting the blurred lines between origin and invention, history and dream. With restrained intensity and sharp, intimate imagery, The Dying Room makes space for dissonance, tenderness, and what can only be imagined into truth.
Brava is a bilingual gut-punch of a debut—fierce, funny, and full of heart. Violeta Garza speaks from the messy middle: too Mexican, too white, too tender, too loud. These poems claim space in the body, in memory, in each awkward threshold. Drawing from ancestral memory, queer joy, and the ache of in-betweenness, Brava blends humor with heartache, sacred rage with laughter. Garza turns shame into sass and silence into sound. Brava is a bold offering for anyone learning that being brave sometimes means becoming unapologetically yourself.
first you must destroy the world is a searing poetic reckoning, where ancestral memory and political rupture converge in forms that gleam and stagger. Claudia Saleeby Savage draws from Arab poetics, erasure, and theatrical invocation to confront war, exile, motherhood, and erotic survival. These poems speak through rithā and ghazal, through absences carved by grief, and densities charged with longing. The story rings clear but never sacrifices the mysticism that lets poetry sing. In a voice both intimate and immense, Saleeby Savage rebuilds a war-torn and tender lyric terrain where personal and collective losses collide—and something sacred floats in the wreckage.
waling waling palpitations is a genre-defying debut that pulses with queer lineage, decolonial reclamation, and lush, embodied ritual. Part drag spell, part orchid archive, this lying hybrid artifact blends poetry, photo-memory, ancestral invocation, erasure, and two decades of queer love letters into a prismatic offering. nawa angel a.h.—also known as Moonyeka—moves through performance, mythology, and intimate ephemera to reclaim matrilineal histories and diasporic queer desire with fearless, feral beauty. waling waling palpitations refuses containment—blooming, mourning, and shimmering across form, language, and land. It is archive. Event score. Heart opening its many mouths.
First Matter Press
First Matter Press is a non-profit press in Portland, Oregon founded in 2018 to dissolve publication barriers for first-time poets and genre-breaking writers. They amplify local voices while empowering authorial ownership. With 22 titles available or in production, their annual releases center community and craft by inviting authors into a creative cohort where they crystallize manuscripts in dialogue with editors and fellow writers and collaborate with featured artists on original cover art. In 2024, they were awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship for Publishers.
nawa angel a.h.
nawa angel a.h., widely known as Moonyeka, is a chimeric creator with a multi-embodied presence in performance, qt nightlife, writing, experimental media, teaching artistry and divination praxis. They center kilig as a compass to conjure erotically charged revolutions with animistic unapology, risque', and Ilocano imagination. nawa's past publications can be found in smoke and mold; Khôra; The Holy Hour anthology by Working Girls Press; Seventh Wave's On Queer Family Anthology; Instruction Manual for a New Era with PNW Conceptual Art Center; Lilac Peril. They have been the recipient of residencies, awards and fellowships including Tin House, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art CXL, In Surreal Life, George Newsome Humanitarian Award, Mary Gates Research Award, Arc Fellowship, and Andy Warhol Foundation's Precipice Fund Award. nawa exists in the in-between, frequently emerging on Tongva, Chumash, Chinook, Puyallup, Duwamish lands; the Coast Salish sea. Waling waling palpitations is their first book.
Annemarie Eayrs
Annemarie Eayrs is a writer and transracial adoptee from China who writes words she wishes she had when she was young. Raised in Minnesota, she now lives with her wife and their many pets in SE Portland.
Violeta Garza
A multilingual poet, storyteller, and weaver, Violeta Garza is the textbook middle child in a family of Mexican immigrants. Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Foglifter, and Acentos Review, among others. They have performed their original poems and stories for Texas Public Radio, The Alamo Chapter for Human Rights, The Center for Refugee Services, and elsewhere. A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, she lives a sweet, queer life in Yanawana (San Antonio, Texas), with her partner and an adequate number of potted plants.
Claudia Saleeby Savage
Claudia Saleeby Savage is an Arab American poet, essayist, and mama with Multiple Sclerosis whose writing and performance explores displacement and the landscape of the body and has been featured in print, on stage, and in galleries throughout the country. She is the author of first you must destroy the world (First Matter Press, fall 2025), metal used for beauty alone (from The Poetry Box for print + voice), Bruising Continents (Spuyten Duyvil), and The Last One Eaten: A Maligned Vegetable's History, with recent print work in Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, About Place, and River Teeth. A Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Poets nominee, Saleeby Savage has received support from many organizations including RACC, Ucross, Jentel, The Black Earth Institute (as an emeritus fellow), MARS, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She creates alone and with her music-text duo Thick In The Throat Honey (they were 2019 semi-finalists for a Creative Capital award on the Syrian refugee crisis). She works in the field of renewable energy and lives with her experimental musician husband, daughter, and vocal cat in the Pacific Northwest.
Pearlyn Tan
Pearlyn Tan is a Portland-based visual artist from Singapore exploring themes of growth, transformation, motherhood, and nature. She focuses on printmaking and painting, and teaches workshops in several studios in Portland. Her work is held in private and public collections, including the Portland Public Art Collection, Beaverton Public Collection and OSU College of Agricultural Sciences.
