The New Economy

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

**2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 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.

Hardcover $22 list price

Bookshop Amazon
Receive this book as a gift when you donate.

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. . . . Calvocoressi is at home in the dark, they live there, even if light is their element. They’re wise because they’re wary.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

“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