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.
Shelby Newsom
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.
Early Praise
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
“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
“Every detail was thoughtfully executed. We're thrilled with the outcome—it’s been such a worthwhile investment to work with a team of genuinely passionate people who not only care about the results, but also care about their clients as people.”