Preorder the 2025 First Matter Press Collection

Cover art by 2025 featured artist Pearlyn Tan 

✨ Authors receive 100% of book sale proceeds
✨ Select flat-rate media mail shipping OR pick up your order at our October 4, 2025 launch celebration in Portland, Oregon (details coming soon!)
✨ Preorder all four titles and get a $5 off bundle discount
✨ Every order helps sustain our nonprofit press & support emerging literature

pre-order the 2025 cohort 4 book set

or select an individual title below ↓

Please note: These books will be released in stores on September 15, 2025. Pre-orders will be shipped to the addresses provided between September 10th-20th or be available for pickup at our event in Portland, Oregon on October 4th. ​

This project was made possible by
​Regional Arts and Culture Council, Multnomah County Cultural Coalition and Oregon Cultural Trust.

The Dying Room
​Annemarie Eayrs

​Recipient of the Prima Materia First Chapbook Award ​for Poetry 

A lyrical, clear-eyed exploration of adoption, identity, and inheritance—told through poems and prose vignettes.

pre-order the dying room

Brava 
​Violeta Garza

Bilingual poems that lean into discomfort and delight, moving between humor and grief, Spanish and English, page and performance.​

pre-order brava

waling waling palpitations 
​nawa angel a.h.

A subversive hybrid work--Mother archetype as an Orchid archetype takes on a polyphonic, spectral experience, as a way to break open the monolithic expectations we have of Mothers.

pre-order waling waling palpitations

first you must destroy the world
​Claudia Saleeby Savage

Written for her daughter, this is an Arab American mother’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis—intimate, aching, and formally daring.

pre-order first you must destroy the world