Coming September 15, 2026
Flesh Memory
Available for pre-order now
The body is its own landscape within Shelby Newsom's new poetry chapbook Flesh Memory. Between nature and self, boundaries collapse. Newsom's poems hold physicality as their subject, and awaken through imagery: a barbed stinger, silk stockings, or half-eaten fruit. Choking on the rind of an orange can test one's stability. Poison ivy becomes a threatening force in a relationship. One can break through inhibitions by participating in the wild: "the river's cool slip / is a sensation soaked in me." From the Rocky Mountains to the Texas Hill Country, to Rust Belt towns, the speaker seeks clarity in other people, but finds it only in the quietude of the natural landscape. Newsom populates this lush new collection with high leaps of lyric, distinctive challenges to form, and considerations of what it means to be both queer and agentic in the contemporary moment.
is the author of Flesh Memory (Gasher Press). She is a queer, disabled poet and ecofeminist whose work traces the intersections of nature, embodiment, and resilience. She holds an MFA in poetry from Chatham University and helps hybrid and indie authors, publishers, and literary magazines shape and launch their work. Her poems have appeared in Deep Wild, Flyway, Hawk & Whippoorwill, Parks & Points, Pilgrimage Magazine, The Hopper, Querencia Press, and elsewhere.
Shelby Newsom
“Flesh Memory is stunning. It startled me with its attention to the ways the natural world shapes our knowledge of power, trespass, sensuality, and desire. In these gorgeous poems, Shelby Newsom makes space for the intimacies —between people, between species, or between a person and a place—that leave us changed. It’s such pleasure to follow a speaker who observes: ‘The whole way home, the river’s cool slip / is a sensation soaked in me.’ I wasn’t ready to leave the world of these poems when the collection ended: I wanted to read it again.”
— Cecily Parks, author of The Seeds
Early Praise
“The poems in this collection, plump with sensuous detail and brilliant imagery, read as meditations on the physical body and the natural world. Newsom conjures a hunger for relationship, while also baring the pain and ephemeral nature of human connection. Her poems cast a spell of yearning and intimacy, corporeal, sacred and dazzling.”
— Sheryl St. Germain, author of The Small Door to Your Death
“Shelby Newsom’s exquisite chapbook Flesh Memory writes the female body with mystery and precision in breathtaking poems that feel like slipping into dark water. ‘Nights are an invitation,’ she says as she guides us toward ‘the breath of leaves’; ‘the moon torn to teeth’; ‘a silk kimono moving an entire wilderness of spiders.’ With evocative language and startling images, these poems bend to desire and root into the damp earth. ‘Does my skin sing?’ Newsom asks, writing into the body’s wounds, memories, silences, and contradictions, ‘awake to every bit of wing / pulled from flesh.’ The answer is yes. With its ‘blue light black ice,’ animal thirst, beehives, knives, and green eyes growing the grass, Flesh Memory mesmerizes and imprints on the reader. This is a gorgeous debut.”
— Jennifer K. Sweeney, author of Foxlogic, Fireweed