The New Economy

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

**2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Finalist**
** 2025 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE Finalist**

A devotional to the ungendered vessel as it ages, dreams, and survives. A practice of radical collaboration, failure, and renewal. A world of “Miss You” poems opening a portal to all those we’ve lost and would love to visit for a while. In Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s latest collection, The New Economy, poems are haunted by the ghosts of loved ones and childhood memories, by changing landscapes and bodies. Calvocoressi’s own figure is examined—investigating the desire to protect the body one is born with and the longing to have been born in another. Cisterns sing with the musicality of a poet who understands both the power of sound and silence—those quiet spaces inviting us to consider the words we cannot hear. “The days I don’t kill myself are extraordinary” one poems says. “Why don’t we have a name for it?” Lyrical and unafraid, The New Economy invites us to name our fears and sorrows, to write to who or what has left us, to create practices that can hold both the darkness and light of this (in)finite life.

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ISBN: 9781556597213

Format: Hardcover

Stacking Cistern My Bones on Top of Your Bones on
Top of Your Bones

Not an optimist. I lie awake at night and say the name
of everyone on the block and for three blocks over
and then the names of the people I don’t know. I call
them by their house number, by their street address.
I wish they not be sick. I wish they not get shot. I wish.
It calms me but also is it selfish? Do I do it to keep
myself alive? I have a theory that if I let the light
out into the world then we’ll all get to stay alive. Want
to stay alive. I think of everything I know about all
the people on my block. I list Ms. Edna and her children.
I say the names of everyone at the church and then
the people I don’t know. I want everyone to have money.
I want everyone to have a house and food and be
believed in and be told they’re believed in. I want
to know these things can happen so I don’t want to die.
Or so I can feel the hollow part of me filling with all
of us getting to be filled up. There’s no part of me that’s
a saint. I’m not saying this to get some extra credit.
I’m saying I wonder if you do it too? My bones on top
of your bones on top of your bones. Or your bones
on top of mine. All of us awake at 3 a.m. wishing the best
for people like filling up an endless cistern with light
and understanding. All the way down to the center of
the earth and up to where the solitary planes fly past.

Reviews

“The enchanting latest from Calvocoressi . . . examines the dichotomy of the body and soul, and the joys and sorrows each provide, through the lens of aging. . . . Survival is revolutionary in this brilliant collection.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Hopelessness is a beloved enemy in these poems, a necessary muse. So are grief and fear. ‘The days I don’t want to kill myself/ are extraordinary,’ begins the most affirming poem about suicide I’ve ever read. All of our violence, Gabrielle Calvocoressi asserts—with a compassion so pure it feels out of step with the times—is born of fear: Violence begins in each of us, is always inflicted first upon ourselves. These poems urge us to do better—we must. The collection was a finalist for the National Book Award.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR “Books We Love 2025”

“Survival and renewal are at the heart of Calvocoressi’s exploration of childhood memories, the ungendered body’s aging, and the commitment to living through fear and pain.” —Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly Top Ten Fall Preview 2025

“In The New Economy, meditations on desire, change, and adaptation result in poems that speak to the most secret parts of ourselves. Fans of Calvocoressi’s exuberant poetry will fall in love with this newest collection and its meticulous unravelling and reorganizing of aging, death, grief, joy, and gender.”—Electric Lit, Best Poetry Collections of 2025

“The . . . poems in The New Economy glimmer with exuberance and sensuality, turning otherwise tedious, clichéd concepts into fertile opportunities for connection with the modern environment.”—Yvonne Kim, Los Angeles Review of Books

“A portal of hauntings and extraordinary song, summoning readers to have courage amidst their own sorrows. Calvocoressi honors the magic and sacredness of an ungendered body, sustaining a devotional poetic voice throughout these investigative, unafraid, and sincere poems. They masterfully make space for both longing and self-acceptance, the fear and the light within us all, conjuring a deeply personal collection that is timelessly urgent.”—Livia Meneghin, Adroit Journal

“A luminous and unflinchingly tender book that remakes the terms by which we understand grief, embodiment, desire, and witness. These poems contend with the starkest conditions — suicidal ideation, non-binary embodiment, disability, material longing, global violence — yet they narrate these experiences from a posture of radical empathy and imaginative abundance.”—Kimberly Grey, On the Seawall