First Matter Press

We are so proud of our 2025 authors and their, now, Pushcart-nominated works!

If you haven't picked up a copy of these books yet, they can be found (with free shipping today!) via Bookshop.org

It’s release day for The Dying Room by Annemarie Eayrs, recipient of the 2025 Prima Materia First Chapbook Award. Available now at Bookshop.org and major online book retailers. If you supported this author with a preorder, deliveries are in process now! Cover art by Pearlyn Tan.

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The Dying Room is a haunting and precise debut that navigates the shifting terrain of transracial adoption and identity. Moving between poetry and prose—told in fragments, crossings, and missing memories—Annemarie Eayrs crafts a lyric journey through dislocation, inheritance, and the slow, uncertain process of self-recognition. In these pages, the search for origin becomes both mythic and documentary—charting the blurred lines between origin and invention, history and dream. With restrained intensity and sharp, intimate imagery, The Dying Room makes space for dissonance, tenderness, and what can only be imagined into truth.

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Annemarie Eayrs is a writer and transracial adoptee from China who writes words she wishes she had when she was young. Raised in Minnesota, she now lives with her wife and their many pets in SE Portland.

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First Matter Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. This literary arts project is supported by Regional Arts and Culture, The City of Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture, Oregon Cultural Trust, and Multnomah County Cultural Coalition.