Living At Baggage Claim: Now Available!

A Message From PAGES Matam:

“Truth is a heavy thing, but it is the only thing worth carrying.”

– James Baldwin

I am beyond grateful and hella excited to announce my second full-length collection of poems and other stories, “LIVING AT BAGGAGE CLAIM” now available on BUTTON POETRY. This is a collection that is over a decade in the making, navigating the mercurial highs and lows of being a Black, Queer, and immigrant artist desperately trying to grapple with their relationship to home, healing your inner-child, and all the griefs in between (and beyond).

I spent a lot of time living out of a suitcase as a traveling artist, nomad, and person with unstable housing. “Living at Baggage Claim” is an invitation to finally put the bags down – from the literal to the figurative. I tried to ask myself in my reflection of the past 10 or so years of my life – being on the road, the people I’ve gained and lost, the vulnerable and prickly parts of me, the choices and decisions I made and that were made for me which left me so broken only the flood of tears could wash me anew – who or is what is home for me? Have I made a home of myself?

I hope these poems give a semblance of an answer or encourage you to craft your own. Thank you to BUTTON POETRY, friends, lovers, heart breaks, soul aches and wild joys that have made this possible, supported me, challenged me, and believed in me.

Get to Know the Author

PAGES Matam (They/He), is a genderqueer college drop-out turned award-winning fi lm-poet and agent of imagination. They create timely and timeless stories centering Black & queer characters defying the odds. Born in Cameroun, Centra l Africa, then blossomed in the DMV (Piscataway Land), they are a polyglot with an obsession for gummy bears , battle-horror anime, and fried plantains as thorough a s their love for creating magically surrealist high-concept dramas and poetry navigating themes of chosen family and alchemizing wounds into gifts. Anansi meets Baldwin with a splash of Olivier Armstrong, their work is deeply rooted in Queer Black liberation, their immigrant experience and love for West-African Folklore, as well as Toni Morrison’s words : “the function of freedom is to free someone else.” PAGES is a National Poetry Slam Champion, Burlesque performer, teaching artist and
organizer.

photo by: Jamal Josef

BOOK RELEASE DAY:
Living at Baggage Claim by PAGES Matam

“I am on a plane wishing I could live
in every sky if it means being closer to you.”

PAGES Matam

We are pleased to announce the release of Living at Baggage Claim, PAGES Matam’s sophomore, full-length poetry collection!

Living at Baggage Claim by PAGES Matam tells a tale across time and cities chronicling what it means to make home wherever you may be.

Read on to discover Matam’s new collection!

“Living at Baggage Claim is a deep pondering on things inherited: grief, exile, longing, memories, but also the ability to lay some of that weight down.”

PAGES Matam

psst… get $7 your copy with code MATAM7 at checkout!

In this collection based on the author’s experiences touring as a performance poet, we journey through the eyes of our fictionalized main character, “the boy?”, who is a reflection of their inner child.

The collection explores a seemingly impossible future trying to honor who they are by accepting who they always were and what they were meant to be.

“Living at Baggage Claim is bold in honesty and tender in recollection. PAGES’ voice is lyrical, fearless, and deeply humane in blending West African folklore with contemporary storytelling.”

Ebony Stewart, author of WASH

From the author:

“Truth is a heavy thing, but it is the only thing worth carrying.” – James Baldwin

I am beyond grateful and hella excited to announce my second full-length collection of poems and other stories, “LIVING AT BAGGAGE CLAIM” now available on BUTTON POETRY. This is a collection that is over a decade in the making, navigating the mercurial highs and lows of being a Black, Queer, and immigrant artist desperately trying to grapple with their relationship to home, healing your inner-child, and all the griefs in between (and beyond).

I spent a lot of time living out of a suitcase as a traveling artist, nomad, and person with unstable housing. “Living at Baggage Claim” is an invitation to finally put the bags down – from the literal to the figurative. I tried to ask myself in my reflection of the past 10 or so years of my life – being on the road, the people I’ve gained and lost, the vulnerable and prickly parts of me, the choices and decisions I made and that were made for me which left me so broken only the flood of tears could wash me anew – who or is what is home for me? Have I made a home of myself?

I hope these poems give a semblance of an answer or encourage you to craft your own. Thank you to BUTTON POETRY, friends, lovers, heart breaks, soul aches and wild joys that have made this possible, supported me, challenged me, and believed in me.”

From the author:

“I mean is this not the most dramatic irony, for a book called “LIVING AT BAGGAGE CLAIM” to have lost baggage upon first delivery. SMH. 

I laughed when I discovered my first delivery of author copies was completely empty, ripped and re-taped over as if someone was trying to apologize for their mistake. Somewhere in the ether there are copies of LABC that may be in the hands of a river, or a person who didn’t know poetry could be magical and healing. I hope it’s the latter more than anything.”

– PAGES Matam

Author Bio

PAGES Matam (They/He) is a genderqueer med-school dropout turned
award-winning multi-hyphenate, pleasure advocate, and agent of
imagination. Born and raised in Cameroun then blossomed in the DMV
(Piscataway Land), they love Mario Kart, anime, and fried plantains as
much as crafting high-concept writing and performance art that speaks
truth to power with topics ranging from culture & identity, maternal
wounds, mental health, and their queer journey as an immigrant!

Read more from the book:

BOOK RELEASE DAY:

Tooth Gaps in the Archives by Francis Dylan Waguespack

“Take the memory of solid ground, not to return to it, but to remember what it costs to leave our footprints underwater.”

Francis Dylan Waguespack

We are pleased to announce the release of Tooth Gaps in the Archives by Francis Dylan Waguespack, the winner of the 2025 Button Poetry First Book Contest!

Read on to discover Waguespack’s debut collection!

“Waguespack’s Tooth Gaps in the Archives is a love letter to a sinking home, to all of the ways a government can abandon both a place and a people.”

Ollie Schminkey

Set in Southeast Louisiana—one of the last regions in the contemporary United States to resist full Americanization—Tooth Gaps in the Archives traces how place-based cultural memory persists beyond its disappearing geography and amid a cycle of forced migration, an emerging domestic climate diaspora, and the slow violence enacted against a people whose power has been systematically withheld through regulatory capture.

In Tooth Gaps, Louisiana is not rendered as the unlucky exception or a site of tragedy, but as a resource extraction colony, its people asked to disappear quietly to facilitate the commodification and consumption of their land, labor, and culture. 

Moving between lyric poems and documentary prose, Tooth Gaps drops the reader directly into the speaker’s interior and exterior worlds without mediation, creating an immersive, embodied experience that refuses abstraction and distance.

From the very first to the very last page, it insists on the body as archive and frames the very existence of the people of Louisiana as an act of resistance. 

From the author:

“I write for my ancestors, for the lost generations of Louisiana Creoles, and for our descendants who will begin and end their lives found, knowing always who they are and among whom they belong. But I also write for you, anyone who is reading these words and feels a tug on their links to the rest of the people of the world. Thank you for reading. I hope you find something here that is meaningful to you.”


– FDW

“Waguespack’s astonishing debut collection of poetry has no limitations—like a magnifying glass held over a lost manuscript, Tooth Gaps brings a previously unknown South into undeniable clarity.”

Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Author Bio

Francis Dylan Waguespack (he/they) is a painter and Pushcart-nominated poet from New Orleans who writes about the politics of disasters and being from a place and in a body that both live under threat. He is 34, and therefore recently found out about birds. His work appears in many publications including ONLY POEMS DAILY, wildness journal, The Penn Review, and Foglifter. He was a finalist for the 2025 St. Lawrence Poetry Award and won the 2025 Button Poetry First Book Award for this, his debut collection, Tooth Gaps in the Archives.

Read more from the book:

Happy Pub Day to Kristina Percy and Both True!

[waiting on kristina release day material]

Kristina’s Personal Statement about Both True

More about Kristina Percy

Instagram @__kpwrites

Kristina Percy (she/ her) lives with her husband & two young children on Vancouver Island, BC in the traditional territories of the Ligwiłda’xw people. Neither of her degrees have anything to do with creative writing. Her work has been published extensively in her Gmail drafts folder, & you can also find it on Instagram @__kpwrites.

Her debut collection, Both True, was a runner up in the 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming from Button Poetry in Fall 2025.

 

(On |Un-)Becoming is here!
Welcome FreeQuency’s highly anticipated release!

(On |Un-)Becoming is a collection of stories, reflections, forgivenesses and offerings rooted in conversations and conflicts with FreeQuency’s mother, chosen family & other selves. The anti disciplinary project liberates the concept of “transitioning” from the realm of Westernized notions of gender and expands|explores|explodes the concept of (un)becoming in relationship to international Blackness, migration|movement, geographic and corporeal displacement, spiritual|mental health and the ties between personal and communal transformation.

More about FreeQuency

Mwende “FreeQuency” Katwiwa is a Kenyan, Immigrant, Shoga|Queer storyteller, speaker & feeler. The 2018 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, a 2017 TEDWomen speaker and ranked 3rd at the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam, FreeQuency is a highly sought after performer, host, social justice teaching artist and workshop leader. Rooted in various global communities & having spent their life at the intersection of arts, education and activism, they and|or their work in Reproductive Justice, #BlackLivesMatter organizing & activism, LGBTQ+ advocacy and writing have been featured on The Independent, the New York Times, OkayAfrica, Upworthy, TEDx, For Harriet, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, Everyday Feminism, & other outlets.

 

Hailey Tran’s an everyday occurrence Is Here Now!

Hailey Tran’s Personal Statement On Their Newest Release

“When I started writing poetry, I never would have believed it possible to write a book of my own. With all of the excitement in the universe, I introduce you to my very first collection of poetry, an everyday occurrence!

Writing these poems challenged me in being unabashedly myself and I can not wait for you to read them. The collection holds up a mirror to my toughest experiences and the journey to overcome them. There is no amount of thanks I could give to my family, friends, editor and community in encouraging me to put my stories on paper.

Lastly, thank you to Button Poetry for seeing me, for your trust in this project, and giving my words the legs to run out into the world.”

Buy and read the book here: https://buttonpoetry.com/product/an-everyday-occurrence/

More about Hailey Tran

Website | Instagram @hails.mt

Hailey M. Tran is a DC-based and Lowell-raised dreamer. They are a queer Asian American Latina spoken word and performance poet, who believes in the transformative power of storytelling and art.

Hailey has their BA in Political Science and Social Work from Simmons University and is currently a high school history teacher. Passionate about helping students understand their ancestral memories, Tran’s pedagogy uses the creative process to interrogate structural and interpersonal violence. They strive to help their students to better understand racial, gendered, and queer identities, and connect with their community at large.

Hailey has competed in MassLEAP’s Louder Than a Bomb with FreeVerse! and the 2018 Brave New Voices Festival where they advanced to Final Stage. They have served as a Youth Spoken Word Leader for the Boston cohort. Hailey’s debut collection, an everyday occurrence, is forthcoming by Button Poetry.

 

WINNER of the 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest Mickie Kennedy’s GLANDSCAPES is here!

Read Mickie’s Personal Statement here:

“In 2024, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It was the kind of news that rearranges your body, your mind, your sense of time. I turned to poetry—not as therapy, but as a way to stay honest while everything shifted.

Glandscapes came out of that year: diagnosis, scans, side effects, surgery. But it’s not just a cancer book. It’s about sex, aging, identity, and what it means to inhabit a queer body when that body suddenly feels unfamiliar. These poems are messy, intimate, and sometimes funny. I didn’t write them to be brave. I wrote them because I didn’t know what else to do.

Button Poetry helped bring this work into the world, and I’m so grateful. Working with Button Poetry has been an incredible experience—collaborative, thoughtful, and deeply respectful of my voice. From the back-and-forth on edits to the cover design process, I felt fully seen and supported every step of the way. 

Holding this book feels like reclaiming something.“

“Glandscapes is an incredibly moving collection, rich with the kind of up-close intimacy that covers such wide ground — parentage, beloveds, the self, survival and not. It builds a rich interior world that is clear and distinct to the speaker, but not isolating to you, the reader, who might want to walk through that world for a while. This book is a triumph, is massively generous, and also just plainly a pleasure to read.”

Hanif Abdurraqib, author of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much

More about Mickie:

Website | Instagram @MickiePoet | Facebook @MickiePoet | Twitter @MickiePoet

Mickie Kennedy is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Sun and elsewhere. His first book of poetry Worth Burning will be published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2026. His Button Poetry Chapbook Prize winning collection, Glandscapes, will be available in Fall 2025. Follow him on social media @MickiePoet or his website mickiekennedy.com.

"I could tell he wished I knew.
I told him about the kids, about Randy.
Six months later, his obituary.
No service, no cause of death.
He never mentioned a lover, or the night
we slept together, all those years ago,"

- Final Snow of the Season, Glandscapes
Purchase Glandscapes Here

Happy Release Day to Chelsea Guevara and CIPOTA!

From Chelsea about Cipota

My book Cipota is written and edited and available to the world today. It is a collection of stories from Salvi girlhood in the diaspora, notes on my own navigation of life and relationships, and lessons on becoming more sure of myself while also being less sure about the future.

This book is a product of love made possible by my families and communities who pour into me everyday, and I’m in giddy shock every time I read my name on the spine.

Working with Button Poetry to develop this collection has been so much dreamier than I could have ever wished for. I’m so grateful to work with a team that truly cares about my relationship to the work, and has provided their constant support, expertise, and vision into making this real and beautiful.

To everyone who has been a part of this process with me, I love you and thank you so much.

To anyone who asks me how I’m doing today, I’m releasing my first book 🙂 and you should get a copy or two here <3 – Chelsea Guevara

More about Cipota

Chelsea Guevara’s Cipota breathes a lineage into a song—making music of ancestral memory: dirges of heartbreak and generational trauma, anthems of rage and reclamation, ballads of love and homecoming.

Guevara’s voice enchants as she delves into history, ancestry, and the self—reaching for a lineage that has been battered by strife and strangled by colonialism. She moves through place and memory with deft skill and earnest humanity. Cipota examines the grief of culture lost, of a home you’ve been separated from, one that doesn’t truly feel like yours. 

Cipota is a beating heart that demands to be heard. You will be rapt from start to finish.

Get your copy today!

Buy CIPOTA

Happy Release Day to Daniel Elias Galicia and STILL DESERT!

Statement from Author:

“STILL DESERT is a collection of poems about the border: a place where life is too often stunned into stillness by tragedy and the crisis that is the border itself.

In that stillness, how do we seek peace, rights for humans and animals, reconciliation, hope, survival, and healing and renewal? In these poems, racism, xenophobia, hatred, bigotry, loss, and death clash against our universal longing for love, fulfillment, empowerment, and a sense of belonging and home.

From this tension emerges a poetic desire to find a painful yet important beauty in the lived experiences of this region’s people. The collection moves through a landscape scorched by the desert sun’s oppressive heat, where each poem searches for relief, redemption, and the rare, precious gift of rain.”

More about Still Desert:

Finalist for the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Prize, Daniel Elias Galicia’s debut collection, Still Desert sings with histories both haunting and enchanting.

Artistically and linguistically dynamic, Galicia’s poems weave personal and historical narratives of immigration, assimilation, and Mexican heritage. Still Desert lingers in the spaces between borders and crossings, breathing in rich, tactile environments and raw, complex emotions. With a musical rage and a sacred love, Galicia speaks to unsung lineages and the violences found before, during, and after crossing the border.

Ash Wednesday at Ricky’s
Waiting

Like what you see? Get your copy today!

Still Desert

 

Happy Publication Day to Forgotten Necessities!

BUY NOW

 

 

“I’m not mad I sold my youth, just that I sold it so cheap.”

Jared Singer in Forgotten Necessities
 

In his anticipated second collection, Forgotten Necessities, Jared Singer wears love and loss on his skin.

 

Through spell-bindingly immersive storytelling, Singer digs to the roots of our deepest woes and cradles our joys with utmost tenderness. Intimacy and vulnerability ache across the time and space of these poems. Forgotten Necessities holds its sadness sacredly and builds shrines to the hope that follows. Persistent reminders of the small kindnesses that make a life meaningful to the living and the dead. A brilliant follow-up to his debut, Singer’s Forgotten Necessities is itself a necessity, a haunting that heals.

 

Check out a performance from Jared Singer down below!

 

 

 

About Jared:

Facebook @JaredSingerwriter

Jared Singer is an Audio Engineer and poet who lives in Secaucus, NJ. While he may have physically grown up with his peers, he has never forgotten the imagination, magic, and nerdiness that were cornerstones of his childhood. He hopes to remind others of these more creative times. He has also appeared on the Indiefeed Performance Poetry Podcast. He has represented New York eight times at the National Slam level, including two final stage appearances at the National Poetry Slam. Jared has long believed in the healing power of the mountains, kittens, and lists of three.

SHOP JARED