2025 First Matter Press cohort release: Annemarie Eayrs, nawa angel a.h., Violeta Garza & Claudia Saleeby Savage

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First Matter Press released four titles of poetry and hybrid literature in September ’25. The 2025 cohort was guided by myself and co-editors Lauren Paredes, Hailey Spencer, and Emily Moon. I designed and facilitated production for both titles, and served as lead editor for Brava and Waling waling palpitations. Covers feature artwork by Portland artist Pearlyn Tan.

We celebrated the release of these books with a reading at Literary Arts on October 4, 2025. The production of these books were supported by generous grants from Regional Arts and Culture Council, The City of Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture, Oregon Cultural Trust, and Multnomah County Cultural Coalition.

The Dying Room

AVAILABLE @ BOOKSHOP.ORG + OTHER BOOKSELLERS

Written by Annemarie Eayrs
Paperback | 39 pages | September 2025
Published by First Matter Press

Waling waling palpitations

AVAILABLE @ BOOKSHOP.ORG + OTHER BOOKSELLERS

Written by nawa angel a.h.
Paperback | 172 pages | September 2025
Published by First Matter Press

Brava

AVAILABLE @ BOOKSHOP.ORG + OTHER BOOKSELLERS

Written by Violeta Garza
Paperback | 53 pages | September 2025
Published by First Matter Press

first you must destroy the world

AVAILABLE @ BOOKSHOP.ORG + OTHER BOOKSELLERS

Written by Claudia Saleeby Savage
Paperback | 65 pages | September 2025
Published by First Matter Press

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. Told in fragments, crossings, and missing memories—Annemarie Eayrs crafts a lyric journey through dislocation, inheritance, and the slow, uncertain process of self-recognition.

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.

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.

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.