Description: "Winner of the 2024 Trio Award, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet explores landscapes of grief, desire, and identity."--Provided by publisher.
Brief description: Rhoni Blankenhorn is a Filipina American writer. Her debut, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet, won the Trio Award and is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2025. A Saltonstall fellow, a Sewanee scholar, a Tin House Summer Workshop alum, and a Community of Writers alum, her work can be found or is forthcoming in Narrative, AAWW, Mercury Firs, Honey Literary, Couplet, Beloit, Copper Nickel, Adroit, and elsewhere.
Review Quotes:
"'Anything can be a weapon, ' one poem's speaker warns, and indeed these powerful poems reveal how even the most commonplace objects and situations carry menacing histories."
-Paisley Rekdal, author of West: A Translation
"Rhoni Blankenhorn's Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet exposes what it feels like to be both alive and haunted by one's aliveness at this particular moment in time."
- Jessica Q. Stark, author of Buffalo Girl
"From the Philippines to the Sonoran desert, from San Francisco to New York City, I imagine the poet and these poems holding hands - finding beloveds elsewhere and anywhere they go and return - all while teeming with attention and discernment."
- Janice Sapigao, author of like a solid to a shadow
"Rhoni Blankenhorn's Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet masterfully hits the exact pitch of grief - at once a hush and a scream punctuated by unexpected laughter. Anyone who has suffered intimate loss will find a home in this unforgettable book."
- Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca