Preorder Rachel Edelman's DEAR MEMPHIS

We are excited to announce that preorders are live on our site for Rachel Edelman’s poetry collection Dear Memphis (forthcoming January 2024).

Sneak peak of Dear Memphis’s cover, designed by Alban Fischer, below. Cover image is a photograph of a door in downtown Memphis, TN, taken by the poet’s grandfather, Dr. Thomas N. Stern.

Description: "What do I know of exile?" asks the speaker in DEAR MEMPHIS, standing inside the colliding geographies and intimate economies of the American South. Offering a direct address to the city where the poet grew up, this collection explores the displacement and belonging of a Jewish family in Memphis, Tennessee, alongside their histories of community and environment. The simultaneous richness and spareness of Edelman’s poems sing with their attention to the particular body and what it cannot carry, what it cannot put down. Through letters, visual art, city documents, and dialogue, Dear Memphis excavates ancestry, inheritance, and the ecological possibility of imagining a future.

Read a “Dear Memphis” poem by Rachel Edelman at Muzzle Magazine.

Thank you for your support of our small poetry press—every single preorder counts, and we do not exist without you, our reader. Note that if you place a preorder and include a current title, we will hold your order and ship when complete.

Thanks from River River Books editors, Han VanderHart and Amorak Huey

Bonus: New press interview in Southern Review of Books