Long For This World
Winner of the 2025 New Women's Voices Contest, Finishing Line Press
None of us is “long for this world,” the saying goes, so we may as well live with a due sense of wonder. In this collection of poems, to “long for this world” is to be open to the unexpected, like a turtle on a runway or angel on a beach at night. The three magi cross the desert, following a star, and one of them is a “fly queen” wearing pearls. A mother offers hard and daring advice, and a fancy neighbor keeps a pet raccoon. The speaker in these poems has enjoyed intimate desire as well as grief and loss, and when she witnesses a solar eclipse, filled with awe, comes to this conclusion: “we are full and hollow/and vacant at last,/ just as we all suspected.”
Forthcoming in September, 2026.
Praise
The title of the opening poem, “Veer,” offers a wry life suggestion, but perhaps it is its closing line that offers the most apt advice: “when you draw a line, don’t be shy.” Emily Pease is not a shy poet. With captivating lyricism and imagery that “creates a shimmering pattern that feels like speech,” readers are brought to their knees. Pease “know[s] that in each shell lives a life./ In a drawer, the knife.” While she is squarely aware people need light and “[q]uestioning everything merely leads to despair,” she is wary; after all, there is the potential that “[e]very car’s backfire a gun, every rustle in the bush, a wolf.” So, she wields and pries, simultaneously wooing and warning, sometimes with a surprisingly buoyant yet directed query, “Hey you over there! What did you love and lose?” but most often with a haunting reminder like, “it’s better to enter the house of a stranger than be carried away by one.” After all, “In the face of tragedy, love is the absurdity we need,” is hardly something one can argue against. Pease is anything but shy in the startlingly profound collection that is Long for this World.
– Deirdre Fagan, author of Phantom Limbs and Find a Place for Me
“My mother said remember,” and we do. Through the poems of Emily Pease, we heed that imperative and remember to remake the world daily. In this debut poetry chapbook, ordinary life and extraordinary loss walk hand-in-hand like terrifying companion angels in a Rilkean South. Emily Pease is wildly in love with the language of poetry, and wildly, language loves her back.
–Majda Gama, author of The Call of Paradise, winner of the TwoSylvias Chapbook Prize, and In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls