NEW! September 2022
In times of crisis when our faculty for language fails, we wait for the oracle to speak in other modes - through visions, memories, in languages of our past and future. Secret messages rise to guide us from a fractured state to a place of agency. The vivid and eloquent poems in Sonya Wohletz’s debut collection One Row After / Bir Sira Sonra take readers on a journey beyond rows of ordered language through polaroid memories, earth-toned landscapes, indigo cosmos, the soft steps of sockfeet down corridors and into the benevolent embrace of a new, healing dimension.
"Like a (meta)physician or a mystic intoning the good medicine of song, Sonya Wohletz offers a way of awakening to a world in which all things breathe, probe, thrill, ache and sigh as we do. To read these poems is to enter a dizzying geography that spans deserts and mountains, south and north, molecule and moon." —D.P. Snyder, translator of Meaty Pleasures "Profound yet ethereal, vibrant and emotionally powerful, this multilingual collection seeks, by its complexity, to illuminate the mysteries of the human condition … It also reveals the disturbing truth about our own “voice” which sometimes, distorted, fragmented, fights to stay alive on the page, in spite of the ravaging time." —Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, author of Traveling with the Ghosts "One Row After is a breathtaking interweaving of “elementary languages in the belly” and a unique physics which envelop—without restraining—memory, place, relationship, and “bütün dünya”, the whole world." —Lisa Creech Bledsoe, author of Appalachian Ground "Sonya Wohletz’s poems use the sharpest, most purposeful language to build a light-feeling lyric space. This book is a mood to which one may cling. A tremendous reading experience." —Chris Gaumer, editor of Revolute Magazine 114 pages | A5 5.83 x 8.27 in. | 2022 ISBN-13: 978-1-958600-04-7 (paperback) $18 We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and our authors maintain 100% copyrights and proceeds of published work. Please consider supporting local and independent book stores by purchasing First Matter Press titles at IndieBound or Bookshop.
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Sonya Wohletz was born as a bat in a cave in New Mexico territory. Having since transformed into a human, she now enjoys the use of opposable thumbs to write, paint, cook, and make glorious messes. Her work has appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Revolute, and Roanoke Review, among others.
