A fierce, intimate new poetry collection from Unsolicited Press examines the violence we inherit, the landscapes we destroy, and the stubborn human desire to find meaning in the wreckage.
The world is burning, the oceans are rising, and the dead have a way of turning up everywhere. In Matter’s Edge, Seattle poet Jerrod E. Bohn confronts the unsettling intersections of ecological collapse, political violence, familial wounds, and intimate loss, searching the deteriorating boundaries of existence for something that might still resemble hope.
Published by Unsolicited Press on November 10, 2026, Matter’s Edge is Bohn’s fourth full-length poetry collection and perhaps his most searching examination of the uneasy relationship between destruction and renewal. Here, death is neither an abstraction nor a convenient metaphor. It arrives as a fish rotting on a shoreline, a bird decomposing on a sidewalk, a friend's absence, or the lingering consequences of a father's violence. Even the natural world, so often offered as a source of comfort, becomes an unsettling witness to human cruelty and environmental ruin.
Across four interconnected sections, Bohn moves between the public and the profoundly personal. Protesters choke on tear gas while lovers struggle to speak across the distances between them. Wildfires devour familiar landscapes, and childhood memories return with the force of unfinished reckonings. Faith, desire, grief, and anger collide in poems that are as formally restless as the world they inhabit. The recurring titles "Matter’s Edge" and "Everything Is Form" become points of return, asking what gives experience its shape and what remains when that shape begins to disintegrate.
Yet Matter’s Edge is not content to catalog catastrophe. Bohn's poetry is full of strange tenderness, irreverent humor, and moments of startling beauty. A cup of coffee becomes an occasion for remembering the rain. An encounter with a spider turns into an unlikely negotiation over shared space. The ordinary persists alongside the unbearable, suggesting that even in a world marked by violence and loss, the work of living continues.
Bohn's language is visceral, associative, and frequently confrontational. His poems move through the body and the landscape with equal urgency, resisting the comforting distance between observer and observed. Beneath their unsettling imagery lies a persistent question: how do we continue to love, create, and recognize one another when the structures we have trusted are coming undone?
In Matter’s Edge, the possibility of renewal does not erase what has been lost. Instead, Bohn asks readers to linger at the boundary between devastation and becoming, where beauty is neither guaranteed nor entirely extinguished.
About the Author
Jerrod E. Bohn is a poet, professor, and pub trivia host living in Seattle, Washington. He earned his MFA in poetry from Colorado State University, and his poetry, creative nonfiction, and music journalism have appeared in numerous literary journals. He is the author of three previous full-length poetry collections, Animal Histories, PULP: A Manifesto, and Ventric(L)e, all published by Unsolicited Press. Outside the literary world, Bohn enjoys cooking, camping, basketball, puzzles, craft breweries, and dive bars.
Book Information
Title: Matter’s Edge
Author: Jerrod E. Bohn
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Publication Date: November 10, 2026
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-969421-19-8
Paperback: $18.95
Distributor: Asterism Books
Purchase: https://www.unsolicitedpress.com/shop/p/matters-edge
Media Contact
Unsolicited Press
Portland, Oregon
info@unsolicitedpress.com
www.unsolicitedpress.com
619-354-8005
Review copies, interview requests, and event inquiries may be directed to the publisher.
