Ajar

Guernica Editions (Essential Poets)

978-1-77183-988-4

100 pages | October 31, 2025

With fierce attention and care, Margo LaPierre chronicles the sharp, shifting edges of gendered violence through the kaleidoscope of psychosis. Holding space for trauma’s echoes and ghosts, Ajar reframes perception—and time itself. These are poems of burrs and blossoms, poisons and salves, starkness and strength. In a sensorial convergence, LaPierre offers an exquisite, needed measure of the world: symphonic, electric, and as ethereal and arresting as a vicious gasp.

Sandra Ridley, author of Vixen

These poems make me want to strip off my skin and jump from a balcony, wearing come-hither shoes, into an inconvenience store after an overdose on entropy. LaPierre can write the pants off anyone. These poems are smart, sexy, deathly, and—I am in love.

Susan Musgrave, author of Exculpatory Lilies

Margo LaPierre’s Ajar is an ecstatic punch to the gut. Unflinching, rich, and infinitely gorgeous, this collection offers an exquisite dissection of mental illness, gendered violence, and their many intersections. Through her equally airy, personal, and precise language, LaPierre’s words and worlds resound and provoke. The result is appropriately unsettling: as if the work of Edward Gorey and Bronwen Wallace had word babies—deliriously beautiful and familiarly off-kilter offspring. A must-read.

Hollay Ghadery, author of Fuse

Ajar follows the time travel of a mind haunted by chemistries of violence and suicidality. LaPierre’s keen lyrical voice creates a palimpsest of overlapping timelines and selves, and methodically crafts an expansive theory of Mad temporality and survival. These poems are rituals for haunting oneself into the future.

Rebecca Salazar, author of antibody