PRE-ORDER: Salvage List

Salvage List, by Chera Hammons

**PRE-ORDER** Forthcoming Publication Date: June 17, 2025

*Pre-orders receive a bonus poem postcard*

Salvage List considers the gravity of inheritance in its most visceral and primal forms. In equal turns quietly meditative and vividly present to the natural world, these poems enchant as they seek to navigate the difficulties of inhabiting our failing bodies in a failing world. Whether tending to animals in the Texas Panhandle or recalling the weight of long-held grief, Chera Hammons remains a powerful voice in this new collection.

Chera Hammons is the recipient of poetry awards through PEN Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds an MFA from Goddard College. Her work, which is rooted in love for the natural world, appears in Baltimore Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Rattle, The Southern Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere. She lives on the windswept prairies of the Texas Panhandle. Her newest poetry collection, Birds of America, is forthcoming through The Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2026.

Praise for Salvage List

“With tender elegance, and a clear, frank eye and voice, Chera Hammons in Salvage List explores ‘the many ways to be alive.’ These richly endearing poems glimmer with multiple windows and doors—changing seasons, relationship with illness, running mares, yucca plants. They feel like instant friends.”  

—Naomi Shihab Nye

“Chera Hammons’ Salvage List is ripe with myriad nests: cabbage moths practicing autosarcophagy in preparation for flight, a hatchery of rainbow trout, condominiums constructed by blue wasps to imprison soon-to-be-devoured orb weavers, a grandmother’s flashy woven wool coat, a baby cottontail’s nest, and finally, as all true children of the Texas Panhandle know, Mason Jars, for putting food by. Yet of all of these sequences of nested miracles, the one that strikes this reader the sharpest, is the series including ‘Chupacabra,’ ‘The Making of the Horse,’ ‘Mustang,’ ‘Red Mare,’ and ‘Trespasses.’ For it is these that illustrate Hammon’s wisdom (and the wisdom of all poets), that ‘now we are strung together of mismatched pieces, / and those who bore us bestow us with our names / as another once named / what had been found in a garden, all those teeming wild and baffled beasts,’ that we might nest within our shared and gorgeous tongues.”

—Gary Worth Moody, author of The Burnings, co-winner of the New Mexico / Arizona Book Award in Poetry     
 
“It’s said that the oldest souls are those who agree to shoulder heaps of trauma in their next life, ailing in body or spirit, walking among us as wounded healers. In Chera Hammons’ breathtaking new collection, Salvage List, it’s the body that ails amid a prickly landscape of locoweed, yucca spikes, and land hurricanes in the Texas Panhandle. Although illness walks beside her in the supermarket and they argue as couples do, although she knows the inhospitable earth will swallow the aching bones of her old horses and donkeys as well as her own, there is always mercy. There is the unspoken bargain with the barren land and its feral shadows: let us abide together in a semblance of healing and survival, saying, ‘I am broken, choose me.’ As we all are. As we all must, finally, choose what to salvage of our own woundedness in this wild, drought-hardened world that we love despite ourselves.”

—Linda Parsons, author of Valediction: Poems and Prose 

Details:

• Publication date: June 17, 2025
  
• Trim size: 6 x 9 in
  
• ISBN: 978-1-960215-40-6

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