the fold by Cass Eddington [Preorder]

Paperback, 2026

Cass Eddington's debut collection of poems, the fold, explores what it means to become a speaking subject as a trans ex-Mormon poet. This isn’t a story of a new Zion, but a story of how Zion entraps you, how escape hatches can be formed through affinities with Outside. A durational performance resulting from a year-and-a-half-long itinerancy and lack of risk aversion, the fold occupies the edge of risk and play to interrupt attachments to scarcity and survival narratives, instead discovering desire and its forms.

Through the fold's serial work, Eddington seeks to envision conditions for self-sovereignty and interdependence, to experience this physically as a precarious body with other precarious bodies, to co-create new economies. Like pollinators moving from flower to flower, touching surfaces create folds, new forms of belonging, the social and the sensuous becoming the plane of ethical action.

Excerpt/interview at Etcetera Poetry.

Advance Praise for the fold:

The etymology for poet and poem makes obvious what is too easily forgot—that a poet is a maker, and a poem a form of labor. The labor is strange, and the pay stranger—not a dollar, nor a wage, but this building for yourself the mind you can live with. Cass Eddington’s the fold is as moving an account of poetic labor as I’ve read, an account of leaving the fold of the faith they were raised in, to forge a faith of another kind, one tuned not to a patriarch in the sky, but the creaturely intimacies of daily life: mouse and dog, sweat bee swarm and thunderclap. An earthy eros weaves together life to living, breath to breathing, touch to touching. Poem by poem we’re initiated into a vision of the world that is not noun, but verb, building within itself the primary laws of its ethics, of its faith: to “make the mess legible,” to “keep the drone audible.” Read and listen—a gentle dogma for a brilliant book.
–Dan Beachy-Quick

Lilting & insistent through its own fuzz, and tuning a dial of attention to its signal, Cass Eddington is writing their way to a home in flux, a bodied home of made & tended-to things. In the fold, a narrative thread becomes whole in its seeking; “I was taught to blend my voice in a choir,” Eddington writes, “I slipped under barbed wire.” Here in supple, layered language they trace an internal & an external escape, & a grappling & a coming-into-being of a sort of continuous & inside-itself memoir. Attention anchors us in the transient world, tending to the whining dog; chicken juice, the doctor’s office, lycra, plastic siding, dishes, rent, always we are with the roving “I”, the synthesizing mind, seeking place & care & rest. “Tell me there are ways to claim without possessing” they write, and in this form offer up, as an almost religious commitment (“my attention, another kind of vow”). Their wandering observations & incisive thoughts filter through the synaptic, lyric architecture of these poems & are allowed to exist in fleeting instances such that meaning can form & found itself, can, here, among the “caressed vocables”, be trusted to carry itself through.
–Cody-Rose Clevidence

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Cass Eddington is an artist, educator, and ecological landscaper originally from Utah. Author of chapbooks Vernal Hurt (Magnificent Field) and TRANSIT (Spiral Editions), they hold a PhD in English and Literary Arts from University of Denver and are the founder of Vocational Poetics. Through Re/Visionary Gardens, they co-create gardens in so-called "Denver" where they live with their dog Jupiter, mad and disarmed by the tall grasses.