TOGETHERING

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TOGETHERING

$16.00

POETRY / LYRIC ESSAY

Veering consciously toward a greater collectivity, Togethering is a declaration to reach for each other and to let that sacred witnessing become the liferaft that carries us through the maelstrom of ongoing apocalypses. In a lyric essay embraced between poems, Rose Zinnia divinizes the coalition between loss and joy, queerness and the earth—the I, the we, and the us. Through encounters with strangers, herons, lovers, rivers, co-workers, family, the Internet, gingkos, Spirit, and a dental hygienist, she turns tenderly inward in order to expand more capaciously and lovingly outward, and in the process unwounds our living, lilts grief into grace. Togethering is the guide to noticing and then blossoming “the nests in which we are transformed to kin.”

Published by Ledge Mule Press, October 1st, 2024
6.5x7.5, 44 pages, Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-9993985-7-9

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PRAISE



Togethering feels like the transubstantiation of love into language. It astonishes me. It tickles me. It inspires me. It plants a field of sunflowers in my heart then gently beckons that whole glad and gleaming field to join it.

— ROSS GAY, author of The Book of (More) Delights

Lucky for us, in the darkness of our time, Rose Zinnia’s marvelous Togethering shines a light via spirit and double-blossom and divine hole-y-ness on how not to be desolate, how not to be un-skied, despite the dire heaviness, despite that we die. This unpinnable work—does not give up—urgently does not give up—on the idea that being together and holding together in revolutionary conflagration (the self, the collective, the choir that sings)—is in fact an activity alive, one that requires generosity, collaboration, vigilance, and grace. This book is art for the futurity of possibility and being in the flash and whirr without shame, “held together by fragments of delight.” Anarchic belonging! Rapturous flight! The invitation is a call to assemble in love!

— MATT HART, author of Familiar


Togethering is a voice-rich, matter-of-fact love letter to the self and all selves (un)contained within. The text shapeshifts, queers, and portals into open-hearted, multiplicitous worlds. Rose Zinnia’s invented vernacular not only maintains the river of communication with readers, but pulls them closer—a boundaryless, intuitive, exacting acrobatics of language that lifts the fog from around her life-breathing philosophies. I’m grateful for the comfort folded into the many beautiful truths she gifts us, in particular: when the world feels too rigid, linear, commodified, and inaccessible, too cruel to possibly support life, joy is imperishably present in all the old hurts, every “exchange of sounds'' with friends or strangers, each alchemizing shift of body and water. I would like to follow this poet to her kinder futurepresent.  

— MOLLY CROSS-BLANCHARD, author of Exhibitionist

Zinnia writes with disarming rawness and vulnerability, as though even their pen is somehow made of soft tissue.


— MATTER NEWS, “Rose Zinnia Stays Soft With Togethering”