An Inquiry of Place
We’re proud of our chapbooks. Each is the result of collaboration between the author, designer and the press. Quality papers, original design, hand binding and of course knockout content are our markers of excellence.
Today I want to share our process of making chapbooks that approach novella-length page counts, which we make for winners of our Newfound Prose Prize. Whether you’re a curious writer or a budding press, I hope you enjoy this look into our work.
Less than the price of three chapbooks plus shipping, you get an annually renewing subscription to our Anzaldúa Poetry Prize winning chapbook, our Emerging Poets Chapbook Series, and our Newfound Prose Prize winning chapbook delivered hot from our press to your doorstep.
Subscription guarantees you a copy of all our limited-run chapbooks before they sell out.
Plus, you get access to PDF downloads of all new and past winning chapbooks for your digital reader (up to three downloads per title).
Your continued support makes Newfound run. Thanks, Newfounder. We couldn’t do this without you.
For the price of single chapbook plus shipping, you get an annually renewing subscription to our Newfound Prose Prize winning chapbook delivered hot from our press to your doorstep.
Subscription guarantees you a copy of our limited-run chapbooks before they sell out.
Plus, you get access to PDF downloads of all past winning chapbooks for your digital reader (up to three downloads per title).
Your continued support makes Newfound run. Thanks, Newfounder. We couldn’t do this without you.
Less than the price of two chapbooks plus shipping, you get an annually renewing subscription to our Anzaldúa Poetry Prize winning chapbook and our Emerging Poets Chapbook Series delivered hot from our press to your doorstep.
Subscription guarantees you a copy of our limited-run chapbooks before they sell out.
Plus, you get access to PDF downloads of all new and past winning chapbooks for your digital reader (up to three downloads per title).
Your continued support makes Newfound run. Thanks, Newfounder. We couldn’t do this without you.
If My House Has a Voice serves as a guide through the immigrant narrative. A blurring of foreign and familiar, a tapestry of cultures and form, this debut chapbook attempts to decode the elusive: language, borders, and (un)belonging. The poems in If My House Has a Voice move across Syria, Russia, and America, inviting us to look beyond ourselves, into the ground and the people that shape us.
“With If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin offers up a vivid, complex, multilingual self-portrait that is also a delightful, sharply rendered tribute to the myriad places and people to whom she belongs. These are poems that move, formally and emotionally: couplets leap across caesuras, ‘lax vowels jaw,’ and histories meet in ways that catalyze a vibrant, surprising, embodied new music. Katrin’s verse makes every sense come alive.”
—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
“In her auspicious debut If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin probes the house of her own becoming, the meeting place of Syria (through her father) and Russia (through her mother)—trying to make a home in a third language (English) and country (America). With elegant, surprising enjambments, and pirouetting turns of phrase, her poems invite us into its confusing and beautiful rooms. A ‘wannabe runaway,’ she observes in ‘Call This Anguish Home,’ she finds that ‘there is no route / I can take that won’t lead me home.’”
—Philip Metres, author of Sand Opera
“If My House Has A Voice is a passport of sorts; an invitation to traverse the neon fro-yo signs of L.A., the metro winds of St. Petersburg, the over abundance of Miami palms, and to see the moon rising over the mountains from the dance floor of a sticky Virginia bar. Elina Katrin acts as psychopomp between the deeply sensual world we know and another world slightly beyond description, knowing, or language. If My House Has A Voice yearns, ‘Let there be a room to feel in a language/ without speaking it.’ Katrin’s collection elegantly, incandescently, creates this room, invites us in, and creates a space intimate enough for us to meet ourselves, wherever we may be.”
—Candice Wuehle, author of MONARCH
“Tender and vulnerable yet not without humor, Elina Katrin’s If My House Has a Voice explores her Russian and Syrian roots and a longing for home by declaring ‘My America is Funfetti but selfish.’ Moving through questions of faith, religion and language, the speaker is ‘invincible’ amid in the searching itself, among the celebrated ‘Van Gogh’s almond blossoms’ and Northwest St. Petersburg—which she calls ‘the truest appendix of the city’—with references to Harry Potter’s ‘7.50 Butterbeer’ that leads to ‘a tempting, Twinkie-paved road,/every bite taking me further //from home.’ And just when it seems an accident might slow her down and change everything (‘‘Titanium,’ I thank my bionic joint’), we, like the speaker are left not with pause or surrender but a candor that opens the collection back up, to be enjoyed from the very beginning again, in many more rereadings: ‘I don’t know what language He wants me to speak. But this is my house, and I am honest in it.’”
—Rosebud Ben-Oni, winner of the Alice James Award for author of If This Is the Age We End Discovery
“In If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin takes us on an intimate journey of language, culture, and the multiplicity of identity. Moving us through Russia, Syria, and America, the boundaries of these countries collide and resist a linear narrative, instead creating an ever-evolving circle of movement. With a language that is startling in its truth, each poem forms on the page like a painting evoking the desire to be understood. Beneath the larger narrative, we feel the push and pull of a child caught in the stranglehold of parental pressures and multiple cultures, grasping for a foothold that can ground her. This collection calls on the reader to hold each poem as a fragment of identity that reveals the poet’s struggle to find belonging through languages whose fluency remains elusive.”
—Pauline Kaldas, author of The Measure of Distance
Born to a Syrian father and a Russian mother in St. Petersburg, Russia, Elina Katrin is now bicoastal, residing in-between Southern California and Northern Virginia. A baking enthusiast, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. Her writing received support from the Tin House Workshop, the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, and The Speakeasy Project. A semi-finalist for The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, Elina’s work was longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s New Voices Contest and has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, bath magg, Hooligan Mag, The Fourth River, New World Writing Quarterly, and elsewhere. When not writing, she works with Mizna and can be spotted video chatting her dog back home or tweeting @linakatrin.
Cover by Nora Kelly.
If My House Has a Voice serves as a guide through the immigrant narrative. A blurring of foreign and familiar, a tapestry of cultures and form, this debut chapbook attempts to decode the elusive: language, borders, and (un)belonging. The poems in If My House Has a Voice move across Syria, Russia, and America, inviting us to look beyond ourselves, into the ground and the people that shape us.
“With If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin offers up a vivid, complex, multilingual self-portrait that is also a delightful, sharply rendered tribute to the myriad places and people to whom she belongs. These are poems that move, formally and emotionally: couplets leap across caesuras, ‘lax vowels jaw,’ and histories meet in ways that catalyze a vibrant, surprising, embodied new music. Katrin’s verse makes every sense come alive.”
—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
“In her auspicious debut If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin probes the house of her own becoming, the meeting place of Syria (through her father) and Russia (through her mother)—trying to make a home in a third language (English) and country (America). With elegant, surprising enjambments, and pirouetting turns of phrase, her poems invite us into its confusing and beautiful rooms. A ‘wannabe runaway,’ she observes in ‘Call This Anguish Home,’ she finds that ‘there is no route / I can take that won’t lead me home.’”
—Philip Metres, author of Sand Opera
“If My House Has A Voice is a passport of sorts; an invitation to traverse the neon fro-yo signs of L.A., the metro winds of St. Petersburg, the over abundance of Miami palms, and to see the moon rising over the mountains from the dance floor of a sticky Virginia bar. Elina Katrin acts as psychopomp between the deeply sensual world we know and another world slightly beyond description, knowing, or language. If My House Has A Voice yearns, ‘Let there be a room to feel in a language/ without speaking it.’ Katrin’s collection elegantly, incandescently, creates this room, invites us in, and creates a space intimate enough for us to meet ourselves, wherever we may be.”
—Candice Wuehle, author of MONARCH
“Tender and vulnerable yet not without humor, Elina Katrin’s If My House Has a Voice explores her Russian and Syrian roots and a longing for home by declaring ‘My America is Funfetti but selfish.’ Moving through questions of faith, religion and language, the speaker is ‘invincible’ amid in the searching itself, among the celebrated ‘Van Gogh’s almond blossoms’ and Northwest St. Petersburg—which she calls ‘the truest appendix of the city’—with references to Harry Potter’s ‘7.50 Butterbeer’ that leads to ‘a tempting, Twinkie-paved road,/every bite taking me further //from home.’ And just when it seems an accident might slow her down and change everything (‘‘Titanium,’ I thank my bionic joint’), we, like the speaker are left not with pause or surrender but a candor that opens the collection back up, to be enjoyed from the very beginning again, in many more rereadings: ‘I don’t know what language He wants me to speak. But this is my house, and I am honest in it.’”
—Rosebud Ben-Oni, winner of the Alice James Award for author of If This Is the Age We End Discovery
“In If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin takes us on an intimate journey of language, culture, and the multiplicity of identity. Moving us through Russia, Syria, and America, the boundaries of these countries collide and resist a linear narrative, instead creating an ever-evolving circle of movement. With a language that is startling in its truth, each poem forms on the page like a painting evoking the desire to be understood. Beneath the larger narrative, we feel the push and pull of a child caught in the stranglehold of parental pressures and multiple cultures, grasping for a foothold that can ground her. This collection calls on the reader to hold each poem as a fragment of identity that reveals the poet’s struggle to find belonging through languages whose fluency remains elusive.”
—Pauline Kaldas, author of The Measure of Distance
Born to a Syrian father and a Russian mother in St. Petersburg, Russia, Elina Katrin is now bicoastal, residing in-between Southern California and Northern Virginia. A baking enthusiast, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. Her writing received support from the Tin House Workshop, the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, and The Speakeasy Project. A semi-finalist for The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, Elina’s work was longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s New Voices Contest and has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, bath magg, Hooligan Mag, The Fourth River, New World Writing Quarterly, and elsewhere. When not writing, she works with Mizna and can be spotted video chatting her dog back home or tweeting @linakatrin.
Cover by Nora Kelly.
Weaving botanical epistles with dreamscapes, road trips, and hauntings, Soil Called a Country reimagines the American West through personal, familial, and historical experiences of the Chinese diaspora. In her debut chapbook selected for the 2023 Emerging Poets Series, poet and anthropologist Grace H. Zhou probes what it means to make a home as an immigrant in a settler colonial nation. Through a speculative poetics of repair, she asks: How to tread softly, dream otherwise, create space for our elsewheres?
“These formally varied poems traverse diverse landscapes, cross continents and oceans that are haunted by history’s forgotten ghosts. ‘We folded the past like a secret / inheritance,’ Zhou writes in the opening poem, before reanimating this hidden past. Soil Called a Country is a stirring excavation of loss and desire, inherited traumas and dreams. It is also a reclamation of home and humanity for some of the unnamed, voiceless spirits that litter our history—the Chinese immigrants who struggled to make a life in a harsh new land, including countless women nicknamed China Mary and the victims of the LA Chinatown massacre of 1871. An anthropologist as well as a poet, Zhou understands better than most the importance of this unearthing. In the closing poem, she writes, ‘To reimagine is to remember. / To feed is to keep alive.’ Soil Called a Country remembers those whom the dominant culture would forget and, in doing so, keeps their dreams alive.”
—Jenny Qi, author of Focal Point
“Here is a poet skilled and perceptive in language as a forager, invoking what is timeless, ancient, and immediate: the life cycles of plants and the preservation of knowledge and care between generations and relations. Through a wide display (and reclamation) of poetic forms, violent histories, and the losses marked by racially-targeted erasure and fracture, Zhou provides remedy. Where there is starvation, there is satiation. Where there is archived language defining immigrants solely for their labor and utility, there is gesture to holistic remembrance, ‘un-bending their backs.’ This is the travel narrative—or rather, a rumination that crosses geographies and time—I’ve been waiting for. Zhou writes complexly, majestically, of land and its descendants.”
—Claire Hong, author of Upend
“In these inquisitive, luminous poems, Grace H. Zhou conjures the past, reclaiming the figure of China Mary, who stands for the great numbers of Chinese immigrant women lost to history. With this sage guide to the Western landscape, Zhou reveals the hope and sorrow that lie in layers in the land itself. Through charting multiple migration journeys, and excavating story from artifact and silences, Zhou has drawn on her anthropological tools to create an art that shows us who we are, where we are, and how to live in the complexity of our stories.”
—Rachel Richardson, author of Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave
“Brimming with lush language and images at once sharp and tender, these poems spurn the mythology of ‘a lie so vast, called a nation.’ The poet chooses instead to locate the diasporic self among the undercurrents: poppy and dandelion, the voices of early Chinese laborers, the life a family makes despite the precarity of ‘stolen / freedoms’ and ‘wiretapped dreams.’ Through the work of deep attention that is the ‘poets’ prayer,’ Grace H. Zhou cultivates the language we need to better know ourselves and our relationships to land, ghosts, and one another.”
—Jade Cho, author of In the Tongue of Ghosts
Grace H. Zhou is a poet and cultural anthropologist. Her poems appear in Ninth Letter, Narrative Magazine, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. She has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Tin House Workshops, and others. A finalist for Black Warrior Review’s 2022 poetry contest judged by Diane Seuss and nominated for Best of the Net, she received her PhD from Stanford University and is currently a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow. She serves as a reader for Tinderbox Poetry.
Cover by Nora Kelly.
Weaving botanical epistles with dreamscapes, road trips, and hauntings, Soil Called a Country reimagines the American West through personal, familial, and historical experiences of the Chinese diaspora. In her debut chapbook selected for the 2023 Emerging Poets Series, poet and anthropologist Grace H. Zhou probes what it means to make a home as an immigrant in a settler colonial nation. Through a speculative poetics of repair, she asks: How to tread softly, dream otherwise, create space for our elsewheres?
“These formally varied poems traverse diverse landscapes, cross continents and oceans that are haunted by history’s forgotten ghosts. ‘We folded the past like a secret / inheritance,’ Zhou writes in the opening poem, before reanimating this hidden past. Soil Called a Country is a stirring excavation of loss and desire, inherited traumas and dreams. It is also a reclamation of home and humanity for some of the unnamed, voiceless spirits that litter our history—the Chinese immigrants who struggled to make a life in a harsh new land, including countless women nicknamed China Mary and the victims of the LA Chinatown massacre of 1871. An anthropologist as well as a poet, Zhou understands better than most the importance of this unearthing. In the closing poem, she writes, ‘To reimagine is to remember. / To feed is to keep alive.’ Soil Called a Country remembers those whom the dominant culture would forget and, in doing so, keeps their dreams alive.”
—Jenny Qi, author of Focal Point
“Here is a poet skilled and perceptive in language as a forager, invoking what is timeless, ancient, and immediate: the life cycles of plants and the preservation of knowledge and care between generations and relations. Through a wide display (and reclamation) of poetic forms, violent histories, and the losses marked by racially-targeted erasure and fracture, Zhou provides remedy. Where there is starvation, there is satiation. Where there is archived language defining immigrants solely for their labor and utility, there is gesture to holistic remembrance, ‘un-bending their backs.’ This is the travel narrative—or rather, a rumination that crosses geographies and time—I’ve been waiting for. Zhou writes complexly, majestically, of land and its descendants.”
—Claire Hong, author of Upend
“In these inquisitive, luminous poems, Grace H. Zhou conjures the past, reclaiming the figure of China Mary, who stands for the great numbers of Chinese immigrant women lost to history. With this sage guide to the Western landscape, Zhou reveals the hope and sorrow that lie in layers in the land itself. Through charting multiple migration journeys, and excavating story from artifact and silences, Zhou has drawn on her anthropological tools to create an art that shows us who we are, where we are, and how to live in the complexity of our stories.”
—Rachel Richardson, author of Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave
“Brimming with lush language and images at once sharp and tender, these poems spurn the mythology of ‘a lie so vast, called a nation.’ The poet chooses instead to locate the diasporic self among the undercurrents: poppy and dandelion, the voices of early Chinese laborers, the life a family makes despite the precarity of ‘stolen / freedoms’ and ‘wiretapped dreams.’ Through the work of deep attention that is the ‘poets’ prayer,’ Grace H. Zhou cultivates the language we need to better know ourselves and our relationships to land, ghosts, and one another.”
—Jade Cho, author of In the Tongue of Ghosts
Grace H. Zhou is a poet and cultural anthropologist. Her poems appear in Ninth Letter, Narrative Magazine, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. She has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Tin House Workshops, and others. A finalist for Black Warrior Review’s 2022 poetry contest judged by Diane Seuss and nominated for Best of the Net, she received her PhD from Stanford University and is currently a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow. She serves as a reader for Tinderbox Poetry.
Cover by Nora Kelly.
Weaving botanical epistles with dreamscapes, road trips, and hauntings, Soil Called a Country reimagines the American West through personal, familial, and historical experiences of the Chinese diaspora. In her debut chapbook selected for the 2023 Emerging Poets Series, poet and anthropologist Grace H. Zhou probes what it means to make a home as an immigrant in a settler colonial nation. Through a speculative poetics of repair, she asks: How to tread softly, dream otherwise, create space for our elsewheres?
“These formally varied poems traverse diverse landscapes, cross continents and oceans that are haunted by history’s forgotten ghosts. ‘We folded the past like a secret / inheritance,’ Zhou writes in the opening poem, before reanimating this hidden past. Soil Called a Country is a stirring excavation of loss and desire, inherited traumas and dreams. It is also a reclamation of home and humanity for some of the unnamed, voiceless spirits that litter our history—the Chinese immigrants who struggled to make a life in a harsh new land, including countless women nicknamed China Mary and the victims of the LA Chinatown massacre of 1871. An anthropologist as well as a poet, Zhou understands better than most the importance of this unearthing. In the closing poem, she writes, ‘To reimagine is to remember. / To feed is to keep alive.’ Soil Called a Country remembers those whom the dominant culture would forget and, in doing so, keeps their dreams alive.”
—Jenny Qi, author of Focal Point
“Here is a poet skilled and perceptive in language as a forager, invoking what is timeless, ancient, and immediate: the life cycles of plants and the preservation of knowledge and care between generations and relations. Through a wide display (and reclamation) of poetic forms, violent histories, and the losses marked by racially-targeted erasure and fracture, Zhou provides remedy. Where there is starvation, there is satiation. Where there is archived language defining immigrants solely for their labor and utility, there is gesture to holistic remembrance, ‘un-bending their backs.’ This is the travel narrative—or rather, a rumination that crosses geographies and time—I’ve been waiting for. Zhou writes complexly, majestically, of land and its descendants.”
—Claire Hong, author of Upend
“In these inquisitive, luminous poems, Grace H. Zhou conjures the past, reclaiming the figure of China Mary, who stands for the great numbers of Chinese immigrant women lost to history. With this sage guide to the Western landscape, Zhou reveals the hope and sorrow that lie in layers in the land itself. Through charting multiple migration journeys, and excavating story from artifact and silences, Zhou has drawn on her anthropological tools to create an art that shows us who we are, where we are, and how to live in the complexity of our stories.”
—Rachel Richardson, author of Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave
“Brimming with lush language and images at once sharp and tender, these poems spurn the mythology of ‘a lie so vast, called a nation.’ The poet chooses instead to locate the diasporic self among the undercurrents: poppy and dandelion, the voices of early Chinese laborers, the life a family makes despite the precarity of ‘stolen / freedoms’ and ‘wiretapped dreams.’ Through the work of deep attention that is the ‘poets’ prayer,’ Grace H. Zhou cultivates the language we need to better know ourselves and our relationships to land, ghosts, and one another.”
—Jade Cho, author of In the Tongue of Ghosts
Grace H. Zhou is a poet and cultural anthropologist. Her poems appear in Ninth Letter, Narrative Magazine, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. She has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Tin House Workshops, and others. A finalist for Black Warrior Review’s 2022 poetry contest judged by Diane Seuss and nominated for Best of the Net, she received her PhD from Stanford University and is currently a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow. She serves as a reader for Tinderbox Poetry.
Cover by Nora Kelly.
Other Stories to Tell Ourselves delivers the news that nothing in the world is final or natural. In his debut chapbook, poet and truth teller Vincente G. Perez counters the abstractions of race and colonization with a passionate clarity that dares his readers to seek out new lives hidden within the hum of the modern world. Other Stories to Tell Ourselves asks: Why fear the unknown when facing it could lead to new life?
“The poems in Other Stories To Tell Ourselves are working overtime on the level of craft and audacity. Within its 29 pages, Vincente G. Perez explores colonization (how it affected black and brown people when it happened and how it affects us now), mental health (‘I turned my pen / outwards when asked to turn in’) and the role of poetry in the times we’re living in, while masterfully using form, metaphor, voice, and repetition. At times, I found myself audibly saying “mmm” when seemingly-simple, weighty statements showed up exactly when I needed them (‘I put a punch down on a page call it a poem’). At other times, I was both shaking my head at all the things that human beings have been subjected to (‘they drowned my home —a Christian baptism’) and impressed with the intentional usage of language that Perez has clearly honed after time spent working with words. This book makes me want to continue calling out the abnormal things we’ve come to normalize—like America’s denial of its racist and bloody history—via foolishly good storytelling and lines, as Perez has done here.”
—KB Brookins, author of Freedom House
“Other Stories To Tell Ourselves elucidates the politically personal cost of well-oiled oppressive systems facilitated by breaking people. Through these poems we’re invited to stare down centuries-long violences without flinching, ‘laugh with me,’ Vincente says. With a skillful vulnerability the intangible is made into workably mundane material for reflection and for action. In these poems death is not the end and capitalism is not the beginning. This work is at once a refreshingly humorous and deeply serious call to remember, interrogate, listen, and uncover.”
—Darius Simpson
Vincente G. Perez is a poet, scholar, and writer working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop, and digital culture. He makes work that refuses binary thinking, which allows him to be in conversation with people, places and things that refuse to make sense in a Western framework. He is currently a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies program at UC Berkeley & holds a BA in Anthropology and Comparative Race & Ethnic Studies from The University of Chicago. They were a 2021-22 Poetry and the Senses Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. Their poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Poetry.onl, Honey Literary, Snarl Magazine, Digging Through the Fat, River and South Review, and more.
Cover by Nora Kelly.
Other Stories to Tell Ourselves delivers the news that nothing in the world is final or natural. In his debut chapbook, poet and truth teller Vincente G. Perez counters the abstractions of race and colonization with a passionate clarity that dares his readers to seek out new lives hidden within the hum of the modern world. Other Stories to Tell Ourselves asks: Why fear the unknown when facing it could lead to new life?
“The poems in Other Stories To Tell Ourselves are working overtime on the level of craft and audacity. Within its 29 pages, Vincente G. Perez explores colonization (how it affected black and brown people when it happened and how it affects us now), mental health (‘I turned my pen / outwards when asked to turn in’) and the role of poetry in the times we’re living in, while masterfully using form, metaphor, voice, and repetition. At times, I found myself audibly saying “mmm” when seemingly-simple, weighty statements showed up exactly when I needed them (‘I put a punch down on a page call it a poem’). At other times, I was both shaking my head at all the things that human beings have been subjected to (‘they drowned my home —a Christian baptism’) and impressed with the intentional usage of language that Perez has clearly honed after time spent working with words. This book makes me want to continue calling out the abnormal things we’ve come to normalize—like America’s denial of its racist and bloody history—via foolishly good storytelling and lines, as Perez has done here.”
—KB Brookins, author of Freedom House
“Other Stories To Tell Ourselves elucidates the politically personal cost of well-oiled oppressive systems facilitated by breaking people. Through these poems we’re invited to stare down centuries-long violences without flinching, ‘laugh with me,’ Vincente says. With a skillful vulnerability the intangible is made into workably mundane material for reflection and for action. In these poems death is not the end and capitalism is not the beginning. This work is at once a refreshingly humorous and deeply serious call to remember, interrogate, listen, and uncover.”
—Darius Simpson
Vincente G. Perez is a poet, scholar, and writer working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop, and digital culture. He makes work that refuses binary thinking, which allows him to be in conversation with people, places and things that refuse to make sense in a Western framework. He is currently a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies program at UC Berkeley & holds a BA in Anthropology and Comparative Race & Ethnic Studies from The University of Chicago. They were a 2021-22 Poetry and the Senses Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. Their poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Poetry.onl, Honey Literary, Snarl Magazine, Digging Through the Fat, River and South Review, and more.
Cover by Nora Kelly.
Other Stories to Tell Ourselves delivers the news that nothing in the world is final or natural. In his debut chapbook, poet and truth teller Vincente G. Perez counters the abstractions of race and colonization with a passionate clarity that dares his readers to seek out new lives hidden within the hum of the modern world. Other Stories to Tell Ourselves asks: Why fear the unknown when facing it could lead to new life?
“The poems in Other Stories To Tell Ourselves are working overtime on the level of craft and audacity. Within its 29 pages, Vincente G. Perez explores colonization (how it affected black and brown people when it happened and how it affects us now), mental health (‘I turned my pen / outwards when asked to turn in’) and the role of poetry in the times we’re living in, while masterfully using form, metaphor, voice, and repetition. At times, I found myself audibly saying “mmm” when seemingly-simple, weighty statements showed up exactly when I needed them (‘I put a punch down on a page call it a poem’). At other times, I was both shaking my head at all the things that human beings have been subjected to (‘they drowned my home —a Christian baptism’) and impressed with the intentional usage of language that Perez has clearly honed after time spent working with words. This book makes me want to continue calling out the abnormal things we’ve come to normalize—like America’s denial of its racist and bloody history—via foolishly good storytelling and lines, as Perez has done here.”
—KB Brookins, author of Freedom House
“Other Stories To Tell Ourselves elucidates the politically personal cost of well-oiled oppressive systems facilitated by breaking people. Through these poems we’re invited to stare down centuries-long violences without flinching, ‘laugh with me,’ Vincente says. With a skillful vulnerability the intangible is made into workably mundane material for reflection and for action. In these poems death is not the end and capitalism is not the beginning. This work is at once a refreshingly humorous and deeply serious call to remember, interrogate, listen, and uncover.”
—Darius Simpson
Vincente G. Perez is a poet, scholar, and writer working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop, and digital culture. He makes work that refuses binary thinking, which allows him to be in conversation with people, places and things that refuse to make sense in a Western framework. He is currently a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies program at UC Berkeley & holds a BA in Anthropology and Comparative Race & Ethnic Studies from The University of Chicago. They were a 2021-22 Poetry and the Senses Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. Their poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Poetry.onl, Honey Literary, Snarl Magazine, Digging Through the Fat, River and South Review, and more.
Cover by Nora Kelly.
If My House Has a Voice serves as a guide through the immigrant narrative. A blurring of foreign and familiar, a tapestry of cultures and form, this debut chapbook attempts to decode the elusive: language, borders, and (un)belonging. The poems in If My House Has a Voice move across Syria, Russia, and America, inviting us to look beyond ourselves, into the ground and the people that shape us.
“With If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin offers up a vivid, complex, multilingual self-portrait that is also a delightful, sharply rendered tribute to the myriad places and people to whom she belongs. These are poems that move, formally and emotionally: couplets leap across caesuras, ‘lax vowels jaw,’ and histories meet in ways that catalyze a vibrant, surprising, embodied new music. Katrin’s verse makes every sense come alive.”
—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
“In her auspicious debut If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin probes the house of her own becoming, the meeting place of Syria (through her father) and Russia (through her mother)—trying to make a home in a third language (English) and country (America). With elegant, surprising enjambments, and pirouetting turns of phrase, her poems invite us into its confusing and beautiful rooms. A ‘wannabe runaway,’ she observes in ‘Call This Anguish Home,’ she finds that ‘there is no route / I can take that won’t lead me home.’”
—Philip Metres, author of Sand Opera
“If My House Has A Voice is a passport of sorts; an invitation to traverse the neon fro-yo signs of L.A., the metro winds of St. Petersburg, the over abundance of Miami palms, and to see the moon rising over the mountains from the dance floor of a sticky Virginia bar. Elina Katrin acts as psychopomp between the deeply sensual world we know and another world slightly beyond description, knowing, or language. If My House Has A Voice yearns, ‘Let there be a room to feel in a language/ without speaking it.’ Katrin’s collection elegantly, incandescently, creates this room, invites us in, and creates a space intimate enough for us to meet ourselves, wherever we may be.”
—Candice Wuehle, author of MONARCH
“Tender and vulnerable yet not without humor, Elina Katrin’s If My House Has a Voice explores her Russian and Syrian roots and a longing for home by declaring ‘My America is Funfetti but selfish.’ Moving through questions of faith, religion and language, the speaker is ‘invincible’ amid in the searching itself, among the celebrated ‘Van Gogh’s almond blossoms’ and Northwest St. Petersburg—which she calls ‘the truest appendix of the city’—with references to Harry Potter’s ‘7.50 Butterbeer’ that leads to ‘a tempting, Twinkie-paved road,/every bite taking me further //from home.’ And just when it seems an accident might slow her down and change everything (‘‘Titanium,’ I thank my bionic joint’), we, like the speaker are left not with pause or surrender but a candor that opens the collection back up, to be enjoyed from the very beginning again, in many more rereadings: ‘I don’t know what language He wants me to speak. But this is my house, and I am honest in it.’”
—Rosebud Ben-Oni, winner of the Alice James Award for author of If This Is the Age We End Discovery
“In If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin takes us on an intimate journey of language, culture, and the multiplicity of identity. Moving us through Russia, Syria, and America, the boundaries of these countries collide and resist a linear narrative, instead creating an ever-evolving circle of movement. With a language that is startling in its truth, each poem forms on the page like a painting evoking the desire to be understood. Beneath the larger narrative, we feel the push and pull of a child caught in the stranglehold of parental pressures and multiple cultures, grasping for a foothold that can ground her. This collection calls on the reader to hold each poem as a fragment of identity that reveals the poet’s struggle to find belonging through languages whose fluency remains elusive.”
—Pauline Kaldas, author of The Measure of Distance
Born to a Syrian father and a Russian mother in St. Petersburg, Russia, Elina Katrin is now bicoastal, residing in-between Southern California and Northern Virginia. A baking enthusiast, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. Her writing received support from the Tin House Workshop, the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, and The Speakeasy Project. A semi-finalist for The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, Elina’s work was longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s New Voices Contest and has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, bath magg, Hooligan Mag, The Fourth River, New World Writing Quarterly, and elsewhere. When not writing, she works with Mizna and can be spotted video chatting her dog back home or tweeting @linakatrin.
Cover by Nora Kelly.
Unsprung: In a book of witness, indictment, rage, heartache, and grief, Burmese writer M. Tu explores poetic form, like a compass swinging wildly toward north, as a means of examining the indefensible political violence in her home country of Myanmar.
“Part documentary and part confessional, M. Tu’s chapbook UNSprung chronicles the tragic stories from Burma’s anti-coup resistance, now stretching into its 20th month. Tu appears in the garb of the spirit lord Thagyamin to address the politically imponent UN in a modern sonnet; speaks in the voice of the late UN Secretary General U Thant to console her distressed relatives; and uses the redacted texts from the UN’s own press releases, punctuated with the perfunctory phrase “deeply concerned” like a tiresome chorus, to indict the international agency for its inaction. Playing with unconventional forms, she uses text messages and hangman figures to pay tribute to Angel, a protester who was shot dead wearing a T-shirt that read “Everything Will Be Okay”; and four activists executed in Insein Prison in July 2022. Alternating between matter-of-fact lines and visceral verses, she confronts her nagging conscience and overflowing anger, and forces the readers—and herself—to witness to the untimely demise of the ngu-wa and yuzana blossoms of Burma Spring. Their lingering scent reminds us that, even in the darkest hours, it’s still worth believing dawn is just around the corner.”
—Kenneth Wong, Burmese-American author, translator, and Burmese language instructor (UC Berkeley)
“Unsprung is a collection that offers a powerful vision of what poetry can do in the world. These poems, that range from the small intimate moments of human connection to the large scale of the United Nations, make clear for readers the human costs of war and oppression. M. Tu is a poet with the formal prowess of a young Gwendolyn Brooks and the vast political vision of our best poets of witness. This is a voice to cherish and a poet to watch.”
—Nate Marshall, author of Finna and Wild Hundreds
“Tu’s words are steeped in pain, each poem is a cry—a rant and a plea living in the collective diasporic consciousness since February 1st, 2021. The author of these poems has captured each heart wrenching disappointment and failure of the international community and responded with boldness. These words allow us in the community to find refuge in our collective suffering and anger, giving voice especially to the experiences of the diaspora, who push the revolution forward everyday.”
—K. C. M. M.
M. Tu is a writer and a poet from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in Longleaf Review, West Trestle Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022) and Unsprung (Newfound, 2022).
Cover by Nora Kelly.
Unsprung: In a book of witness, indictment, rage, heartache, and grief, Burmese writer M. Tu explores poetic form, like a compass swinging wildly toward north, as a means of examining the indefensible political violence in her home country of Myanmar.
“Part documentary and part confessional, M. Tu’s chapbook UNSprung chronicles the tragic stories from Burma’s anti-coup resistance, now stretching into its 20th month. Tu appears in the garb of the spirit lord Thagyamin to address the politically imponent UN in a modern sonnet; speaks in the voice of the late UN Secretary General U Thant to console her distressed relatives; and uses the redacted texts from the UN’s own press releases, punctuated with the perfunctory phrase “deeply concerned” like a tiresome chorus, to indict the international agency for its inaction. Playing with unconventional forms, she uses text messages and hangman figures to pay tribute to Angel, a protester who was shot dead wearing a T-shirt that read “Everything Will Be Okay”; and four activists executed in Insein Prison in July 2022. Alternating between matter-of-fact lines and visceral verses, she confronts her nagging conscience and overflowing anger, and forces the readers—and herself—to witness to the untimely demise of the ngu-wa and yuzana blossoms of Burma Spring. Their lingering scent reminds us that, even in the darkest hours, it’s still worth believing dawn is just around the corner.”
—Kenneth Wong, Burmese-American author, translator, and Burmese language instructor (UC Berkeley)
“Tu’s words are steeped in pain, each poem is a cry—a rant and a plea living in the collective diasporic consciousness since February 1st, 2021. The author of these poems has captured each heart wrenching disappointment and failure of the international community and responded with boldness. These words allow us in the community to find refuge in our collective suffering and anger, giving voice especially to the experiences of the diaspora, who push the revolution forward everyday.”
—K. C. M. M.
“Unsprung is a collection that offers a powerful vision of what poetry can do in the world. These poems, that range from the small intimate moments of human connection to the large scale of the United Nations, make clear for readers the human costs of war and oppression. M. Tu is a poet with the formal prowess of a young Gwendolyn Brooks and the vast political vision of our best poets of witness. This is a voice to cherish and a poet to watch.”
—Nate Marshall, author of Finna and Wild Hundreds
M. Tu is a writer and a poet from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in Longleaf Review, West Trestle Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022) and Unsprung (Newfound, 2022).
Cover by Nora Kelly.
Unsprung: In a book of witness, indictment, rage, heartache, and grief, Burmese writer M. Tu explores poetic form, like a compass swinging wildly toward north, as a means of examining the indefensible political violence in her home country of Myanmar.
“Part documentary and part confessional, M. Tu’s chapbook Unsprung chronicles the tragic stories from Burma’s anti-coup resistance, now stretching into its 20th month. Tu appears in the garb of the spirit lord Thagyamin to address the politically imponent UN in a modern sonnet; speaks in the voice of the late UN Secretary General U Thant to console her distressed relatives; and uses the redacted texts from the UN’s own press releases, punctuated with the perfunctory phrase “deeply concerned” like a tiresome chorus, to indict the international agency for its inaction. Playing with unconventional forms, she uses text messages and hangman figures to pay tribute to Angel, a protester who was shot dead wearing a T-shirt that read “Everything Will Be Okay”; and four activists executed in Insein Prison in July 2022. Alternating between matter-of-fact lines and visceral verses, she confronts her nagging conscience and overflowing anger, and forces the readers—and herself—to witness to the untimely demise of the ngu-wa and yuzana blossoms of Burma Spring. Their lingering scent reminds us that, even in the darkest hours, it’s still worth believing dawn is just around the corner.”
—Kenneth Wong, Burmese-American author, translator, and Burmese language instructor (UC Berkeley)
“Tu’s words are steeped in pain, each poem is a cry—a rant and a plea living in the collective diasporic consciousness since February 1st, 2021. The author of these poems has captured each heart wrenching disappointment and failure of the international community and responded with boldness. These words allow us in the community to find refuge in our collective suffering and anger, giving voice especially to the experiences of the diaspora, who push the revolution forward everyday.”
—K. C. M. M.
“Unsprung is a collection that offers a powerful vision of what poetry can do in the world. These poems, that range from the small intimate moments of human connection to the large scale of the United Nations, make clear for readers the human costs of war and oppression. M. Tu is a poet with the formal prowess of a young Gwendolyn Brooks and the vast political vision of our best poets of witness. This is a voice to cherish and a poet to watch.”
—Nate Marshall, author of Finna and Wild Hundreds
M. Tu is a writer and a poet from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in Longleaf Review, West Trestle Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022) and Unsprung (Newfound, 2022).
Cover by Nora Kelly.
