Gravity Siren

Author: Monroe Lawrence

Publisher: Beautiful Days Press (2026)

Gravity Siren situates its speaker in the calendars of colonial and ecological history. Plangent with affect and cringe yet at once restrained and prosodic, the poems exhibit frustration and debasement, elation and freedom, treating family and environment by turns. Gravity Siren moves from “playing seriously on the roof” in the shadows of empire, fire, murder, and weather to the language of art history and the damp theaters of the Pacific Northwest, registering the pressures and priorities of wielding language under the sign of crisis. For a world in which “the moose stumbles from the river ripping its own hide from itself” and a moth “struggles past snow,” Gravity Siren attempts to ask, “What else is there but expressing to others what they have meant to you?”