Gravity Siren by Monroe Lawrence [PREORDER]

Paperback, 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?”

Versions of these poems in Annulet and Black Sun Lit.

Interview with rob mclennan.

Praise for Gravity Siren:

"In Gravity Siren Monroe Lawrence en-fires within their second book-length document an elided osmosis not unlike osmotic rays of light akin to an implied solar awakening seemingly dimmed right after dawn."
—Will Alexander

"I think of Donne (and his time-bending “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”) chancing upon an Objectivist notation between deep meditations of doubt: poems where a midden and a bus coexist with pterodactyls and Byron; where the pain of existence and the knowledge of science ask for the nobility of a new faith."
—Martin Corless-Smith

"Everything in the sky of Lawrence’s linguistic landscape is perennial. There are prisms of tributary feeling, prisms of radiance, the translucent core they find in their mom and dad. Even when one wrestles with “sunlight tilted in / idiosyncratic tiled shadows,” searching for home, longing, and love in their words, we may find it, paradoxically, by “heaving / light through / the prism like / plastic again”—traveling the endless tributaries of their majestic lines, aching with life and love and hope amid all that is ecologically terrifying and desolate."
—Vi Khi Nao

ISBN: 979-8-9916468-3-3

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Monroe Lawrence was born on Vancouver Island, Canada. They grew up in Squamish on the traditional territory of the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw. They are the author of About to Be Young, as well as the chapbooks Nice,, Gamer and Lancelot du Lac.