Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet
Note: This title will ship on June 25, 2025
Winner of the 2024 Trio Award, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet explores nonlinear landscapes of grief, desire, and identity. This debut poetry collection revolves around love and loss (parents, family, friends, childhood, pets, the environment), while confronting the fracturing and inescapable presence of absence and longing. Even as our speaker butters toast, pets dogs, drives across bridges, kisses lovers, admires art, and holds hands with friends, she slips between exterior and interior experience with unflinching perception, uncanny imagination, and a bizarre sense of humor. Contrast and tension reveal violences simmering just beneath the skin of beauty, propriety, and sociopolitical expectation. Observing shadow on a white brick wall turns elegiac. Desert hikes expand into the surreal. Animals and monsters offer curious provocations into sexuality, multiracial and multicultural selfhood. Abyssal sadness coexists with ghosts eating candy, and unspoken danger with linguistic comedy. These poems invite us to embrace complex and layered emotions as an act of resilience.
Jessica Q. Stark / author of Buffalo Girl
“Rhoni Blankenhorn’s Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet exposes what it feels like to be both alive and haunted by one’s aliveness at this particular moment in time.”
Paisley Rekdal / author of West: A Translation
“‘Anything can be weapon,’ one poem’s speaker warns, and indeed these powerful poems reveal how even the most commonplace objects and situations carry menacing histories.”
Artwork sampled from Ginny Benson // VX Bliss
Janice Sapigao / author of like a solid to a shadow
“From the Philippines to the Sonoran desert, from San Francisco to New York City, I imagine the poet and these poems holding hands — finding beloved elsewhere and anywhere they go and return — all while teaming with the attention and discernment.”
Eugenia Leigh / author of Bianca