Querencia Winter 2025

by Emily Perkovich (Editor), Aaron Babcock (Contributor), Alex Carrigan (Contributor)

Querencia Press's Winter 2025 anthology features 53 contributors of Poetry, Fiction, & Non-fiction work. Themes of the collection vary widely and the editor would like to include content warnings for self-harm, addiction, grief, domestic violence, religious trauma, sexual trauma, gender dysphoria, and politics, as well as some blood and body horror.

*Edited by Emily Perkovich

Genres: Poetry

156 pages, Paperback

Published January 31, 2025

About the author

Emily Perkovich (she/her) is from the Chicago-land area. She is the Editor in Chief of Querencia Press, a poetry reader with Split Lip Mag, and on the Women in Leadership Advisory Board with Valparaiso University. Her work strives to erase the stigma surrounding trauma victims and their responses. She is a Pushcart & a Best of the Net nominee, a SAFTA scholarship recipient, and is previously published with Horror Sleaze Trash, Harness Magazine, Rogue Agent, Coffin Bell Journal, and Awakenings among others. Em is Otomí and learning ways to reconnect with her kin. You can find her on IG @undermeyou or Twitter @emily_perkovich or visit her website.

Reviews

[Paige Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Million authors. Most of this is poems. Full of smooth bones, fairy forests, bugs on dewey leaves, changing seasons. Sad beautiful churches and breakup playlists, dysphoria of all sorts, the “kind of love that “turns ribs to rust.” Tangerines & Transcendence was a bite-size fav.

Cool story about a tree person, very grounded and thoughtful throughout à life til 30. Then à sort of Cinderella story about shaving down à foot to fit into a royal shoe. This and the deer story are neat and def wintry but seemed like they needed to be longer to get to know the families before diving into the animal adjacent sorrows.

There are several space stories that touch on the sentimental. Another pandemic piece— but involving ants and ghosts and trigger-happy killing. Then there’s my story I wrote a long time ago so it’s a little too dramatic and ornate especially in dialogue. Án ironic modern thing in other ways. It’s the Rapunzel meets Grim Reaper medicated mashup.

There’s a small nonfiction space about cancer and grief making you forget little things—like even wiping! Another about vague election fear, about telling their small daughter adult things and dealing with their anxiety by knitting beanies, presumably pussy hats but it comes off like an old H3H3 skit. It’s broad enough you could pretend it’s fictional and apply it to other times and countries though.

Less cardboard than the piece opening by implying Islam doesn’t subjugate women’s learning and the dozens of they/thems in this issue like or worse than every other religion. Commodifying the pronouns like a cheap promo gimmick was also cringey though. Bios should be side by side work more than just gender that may try to contextualize pieces that should or do already stand on their own.

I rather know social handles to follow work or other publications they were in, which there was surprisingly little of even in the back.

[blue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully curated collection :')