Button Poetry

What I Learned from the Trees delves into the intricate relationship between humans and nature, and how these often overlooked, everyday interactions affect us as individuals, families, and communities. With a backbone rooted in primordial imagery and allegory, and a focus on how the growing disconnect with our own wants, needs, and fears creates deeper divides in our relationships, this collection is notably relevant to today’s society and the struggles we face with the ever-expanding detachment between humans and the natural world.

Latinx, queer, poet Bianca Phipps dissects intimate family relationships in hopes of understanding conflict as a means of overcoming. Phipps’ debut explores an alternate timeline version of their own childhood and by moving back and forth between those timelines they highlight their own generational inheritance while inviting us to discover our own.

These poems dip their hands into the fabric of black womanhood and revel in it. shimmer establishes Olayiwola firmly in the lineage of black queer poetics, celebrating the work done by generations of poets from Audre Lorde to Danez Smith. This is a book of gentle breaking and inventive reconstruction. A book of self and community-care―the pursuit of building a world that will not only keep you alive but keep you joyful.

Urbanshee is Siaara Freeman’s retelling of fairy tales and mythological stories through a modern and urban lens. This collection discusses the weight of being Black in America, Freeman’s relationships to lovers and family, and how the physical place you grew up can become part of your identity. Urbanshee expertly combines humor, fantasy, and raw emotion to create this astonishing reinvention of classic fables.

Following her widely successful debut, Baird wastes no time as she reels in her audience with breathtaking imagery and punching narratives. With expert precision and vulnerability, Baird guides us on an expedition embracing queerness, love, loss, mental health, feminism & healing along the way.

Darius Simpson’s debut collection Never Catch Me centers on Black boyhood in the midwest and familial disintegration over time. Simpson pulls back the curtain, exposing the violence enacted against and upon, Black bodies, and yet, still, each poem is saturated in revolution and hope. Never Catch Me is the anthem necessary to organize a community that is committed to a better right now–one that can only be achieved with an intensity and action that goes far beyond the page.

A Peculiar People creates an entire microcosm within these poems. Steven Willis crafts an entire cast of characters, showcasing their struggles, identities, & underlying emotions. Willis champions the art of storytelling: weaving pop-culture and screenwriting elements to allow the listener to view this social commentary with a fresh lens. This collection examines the author’s life experience; the pain of being Black and facing systemic racism.

We Slept Here is a case study in vulnerability and honesty. In this sequence of memoir-esque poems, Sierra DeMulder pulls at the threads of a past abusive relationship and the long road to forgiveness. The poems themselves become an act of recovery and reclamation, wherein the poet finds again the voice that was taken from her. These are hard poems, made up of clarity and healing, that attempt to share some of their peace with the world.

In Please Come Off-Book, Kevin Kantor crafts a raw and vulnerable confluence between two of their passions: acting and poetry, using their experiences as a trans non-binary theatre maker as an extended lens of exploration into gender identity, family dynamics, and growing up queer. Kantor critiques the treatment of queer figures with an adroit blend of humor and earnest longing, imagining a braver and bolder future, one in which Hamlet is trans (obviously) and queer characters get to survive their own stories.

The first full-length collection of poems from Rachel Wiley, whose work spans from body image, to love and loss, and feminism. Fat Girl Finishing School is a love letter to Wiley’s living body. When confronted with fatphobia, racism, misogyny, and shame, each poem chooses self-love, despite society’s expectations of conformity. More than just a book about one single identity, Fat Girl Finishing School makes intersectionality dimensional. This is a book steeped in experience; every story is striking, powerful, and unmistakably palpable.

Through poems of immense emotion, and the use of alluring form, Abraham crafts work that examines what we come to own by existing.

Phil Kaye’s debut collection is a stunning tribute to growing up, and all of the challenges and celebrations of the passing of time, as jagged as it may be. Kaye takes the listener on a journey from a complex but iridescent childhood, drawing them into adolescence, and finally on to adulthood. There are first kisses, lost friendships, hair blowing in the wind while driving the vastness of an empty road, and the author in the middle, trying to make sense of it all. Date & Time is a welcoming story, which freezes the calendar and allows us all to live in our best moments.