PREORDER: Itinerant Songs by Terra Oliveira

My new poetry book is now available to preorder!

Hello and happy national poetry month!

In very exciting news, you can now officially preorder my latest poetry book, Itinerant Songs, through Recenter Press. I’ve been working on this collection since 2018, and I’m beyond thrilled to finally bring these poems to you.

For those of us that work and are weighed down, Itinerant Songs is a yearning for home—for safe, affordable shelter, clean, commonly-held water, and the rights to our own land and being amongst our people. Through low-wage jobs, the “hard-facts of devotion,” and pilgrimage and recovery, these poems are a politically urgent testament to our times as much as they are a lasting, spiritual attestation.

Many periods of my life have weaved their way into the poems in this book: years of housing insecurity and inconsistency, working multiple jobs in multiple industries, political organizing, walking 500+ miles along the Portuguese Camino de Santiago, social media addiction and trauma recovery, grappling with illness and loss, developing my relationship with God, with ancestors, and with myself — all forming a cohesive whole that makes up Itinerant Songs.

Preorder Itinerant Songs today, it would mean so much to me!

Thank you infinitely to the authors I look up to who have shared advance praise of Itinerant Songs:

"I felt such power reading this book. The poems keep strumming the big 'we'—we who tend the earth, who work underpaid jobs, who live in moldy homes and breathe in wildfire smoke. These populist prayers hum with aliveness. Here is the world so frankly recorded that it feels new."
— Lora Mathis, author of The Snakes Came Back (Metatron Press)

"What we need for the times ahead are words, language, an articulation of all the unseen and unsaid things—and Terra Oliveira's Itinerant Songs is exactly this. This book provokes by stating the truth and encouraging conviction through annunciation—'honesty is the warmest blanket,' Oliveira reminds us. These words connect us and they buoy us towards the future."
— Fariha Róisín, author of Survival Takes a Wild Imagination (Andrews McMeel)

“Itinerant Songs is a prayer, a protest, and an outstretched hand rooted in solidarity. Through poems that move across cities, histories, and homelands, Terra Oliveira traces the contours of labor, belonging, grief, and spiritual longing with a voice that is both precise and tender. This collection honors the political in the personal and the everyday acts of resistance that keep us connected to each other and the earth. Oliveira writes toward a world where care is not a luxury—where housing, healthcare, water, and rest are rights, not privileges, and where the act of noticing becomes a necessary form of defiance. These pages hold reverence for those who came before, care for those living through the now, and a steady hope for the future we must all work to build together.”
— Sam Slupski, author of Until Tender (Game Over Books)

There are many new, unpublished poems included in the book alongside poems that have been published in The American Poetry Review, Bamboo Ridge, Puerto del Sol, Protean Magazine, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Paperbark Magazine, Vagabond City Lit, The Tiny, and other publications. Huge thank you to the publications that have shared my poems over the past few years — it has been such an immense labor of love to bring them to you here in book form today.

Cover art is “Protest Angel,” a hand-carved linocut block print by the incredible Chattanooga-based artist and labor organizer Tabitha Arnold, to whom I’m also very grateful.

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Help get the word out about Itinerant Songs during the pre-release period! It would make a huge difference you could do one or a couple of these small actions:

• Send a quick text or email to friends and family with a link to the pre-order, or forward this newsletter announcement to a handful of people you know.

• Share your anticipation of the book on any or all of your social media platforms or in your newsletter or anywhere else.

• Talk about the book to your friends when getting coffee, taking a walk, hanging out. Word-of-mouth is truly my favorite means of word-spreading.

• Gift a pre-order copy of the book to one or a few loved ones.

• Take the time to put the book on your “want to read” shelf on Goodreads.

• I would love to share a free PDF of the book with you if you can review the book (5 words or 5 paragraphs, anything goes!) on social media, in your newsletter, on your blog, on your podcast, on Goodreads, or on any publication! Reply to this email to request a free PDF of the book before the book is released and I will send it to you.

• If you’d be willing to write a formal review for the book and either: 1) you pitch or submit it to lit mags or 2) I submit your already written review to lit mags, I would also be more than happy to send you a free PDF of the book and then mail you a free thank you copy when it releases.

• Are you organizing a poetry reading in or near the Bay Area, at a bookstore or cafe or a park or in someone’s backyard? I’d love to be included in the reading and to share poems from this collection. Please do reach out!

• Ask your local bookstore and library to carry the book, which they will soon be able to order wholesale from Ingram using ISBN 979-8-218-64593-9.

Thank you to all of you who have read and supported my work over the years. Poetry cannot live in isolation, and I am humbled that the success of an independently-published book does truly depend on readership and others getting the word out. There is no corporate marketing team or big publisher funding my book, so I am especially grateful to those of you that order a copy and share. This is really my favorite work I’ve created yet and I can’t wait to see how it lives in each of your lives.