EVEN THE AIR, TOO HEAVY
​Riley Danvers

When the body becomes a monument of loss, the self must navigate a vast internal space, not on the world’s timeline, but in its own circadian cadences. Riley Danvers’ collection, Even the Air, Too Heavy, wayfinds through the emptiness of miscarriage with words and experimental forms that examine the vacated, the absent, the lost. What is not on the page is as devastating as the recounting. The autonomous physiology of the body and the sterile technical procedures we apply to it magnify the estrangement between body and mind. In a world of how-to’s and what-next’s, Danvers’ collection lives in the timelessness of tides and patterns, where the self drifts long as it takes for a path of healing to emerge.

"Riley Danvers’ Even the Air, Too Heavy rocks this poetic world with her debut echoic splendor. … It’s a collection that is heavy like a star, but also light like silver ... And, it drifts downward into a tributary of uterine memory, history, and sound we least anticipated."
 —Vi Khi Nao, author of Swimming with Dead Stars

"Riley Danvers has transformed indescribable injury, giving music where otherwise there is silence. Where the poet locates loss, she centers revelations of an interconnectedness beyond our individualism."
—C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking

"These poems devastate with direct address, metaphor that punches the gut, and questions that pierce the reader’s senses."
—Kate Gray, author of For Every Girl

"Even the Air, Too Heavy heaves with the gravity of longing and loss, but it’s also an instruction manual for how to live in the void without avoidance. This is a book that finds the universal in the personal relentlessly. It scorches the earth and moves mountains with its love." 
—Matt Hart, author of Everything Breaking/For Good


70 pages | A5  5.83 x 8.27 in. | 2022
ISBN-13: 978-1-958600-01-6 (paperback)
$15

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Riley Danvers is a bisexual poet living in Portland, Oregon with her partner, their cat, Lester, and corgi, Kiki. She graduated in 2016 with her A.S. in English and in 2018 with her B.A. in English Literature and Writing. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in more than twenty-five online and printed literary journals and anthologies. Her poetry has been published in Z Publishing House, Silkworm, Clackamas Literary Review, Other Worldly Women Press, Chasing Shadows, and Fox Paw Literary Blog. Riley graduated with her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Willamette University in 2021, and is currently pursuing a M.A. in Literature from Mercy College. Her debut book of poetry is forthcoming from First Matter Press.

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