welcome
Charity E. Yoro’s debut poetry collection, ten-cent flower & other territories, is available now (First Matter Press, 2023).
Photo by Arianna Chau
ten-cent flower & other territories explores what is lost in lineage, translation, transaction, and seeks reclamation through mapping. Through etymologies of place names and monuments and godheads to navigating complex geographies of mother/daughter, lover/other, colonizer/colonized; from ledger of transgressions to passage through birth canal, with quiet defiances against autocorrect, capitalization. It is a collection of constellation, origin story, futures.
Purchase the book from major retailers:
As well as the following local, indie bookstores: Broadway Books (Portland), Powell’s Books (Portland), Medicine for Nightmares (San Francisco), Telegraph Hill Books (San Francisco), The Libros Lincoln Heights (Los Angeles), and Kona Bay Books (Kona). Thank you for supporting small business!
Advance Praise
Cover image by Lara Rouse | Design by ash good
“Charity Yoro’s poems astonish—carefully wrought yet equally wild. Navigating the tensions between beauty, commodity and place, they perform a richly textured quick-step that is bold, sly, funny, tender, fierce.”
—Michele Glazer, author of Oregon Book Award Finalist fretwork
“Through poems that range in form from haiku to crosswords to abecedarian primers, Yoro asks us to consider the urgency of language: what words will offer those who come after us, and will these words tell the truth of our histories, in all their terrors and delights?”
—Jennifer Perrine, author of Again and No Confession, No Mass
“‘Fractal, webbed,’ Yoro’s intricate and inventive poems flash with memorable phrasings, imagining into being a ‘territory of unmastered language.’ It’s not a book for tourists. Readers who attend closely to its ‘sunken moon prayers,’ though, will find a new voice of rare insight, commitment, and beauty.”
—John Beer, author of The Waste Land and Other Poems
“In this astonishing achievement of a book, Charity Yoro expands the artistic repertoire of poetry with refreshing self-awareness, technical dexterity, and grace. Whether working in inherited forms, found forms, or invented ones, Yoro's writing is marked by a singularity of voice and vision. She is clearly a rising star in the contemporary literary landscape.”
—Kristina Marie Darling, author of Daylight Has Already Come & X Marks the Dress: A Registry