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.
2025 First Matter Press Featured Cover Artist—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.
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.
