Unbound Edition Press today announced it will publish poet Angie Estes’ seventh collection of work, Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City. The title is scheduled for publication in April 2025, as part of National Poetry Month.
Estes is widely celebrated for her work. She has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Audre Lorde Prize for lesbian poetry, and was a 2010 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Among her many achievements are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. In 2023, she was the Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House.
Poet and critic Stephanie Burt, writing for Boston Review, said of Estes’ work, “Angie Estes has recently created some of the most beautiful verbal objects on the planet.”
A dedication to the transformative power of language itself defines Estes’ forthcoming Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City. Peter Campion, executive editor at Unbound Edition Press, acquired the title for the house, and is editing the collection with Estes. He notes: “These poems excavate Baudelairean correspondences—secret relations in the world of things—reveling in the ways that etymology accesses the ancient life of language, even as the play and slippages of language itself access alternative modes of being. Language in this work becomes a way of moving across, questioning time and culture.”
Patrick Davis, publisher and editor in chief at Unbound Edition Press, said, “This collection may be the richest, most intimate, excavation yet by Estes of how the past informs the present, how the history of language makes meaning in our lives today. We are beyond honored to publish the remarkable collection.”
