THE RIVER THE NIGHT Remembers
Winner of the 2025 Maine Chapbook Series in Poetry
Forthcoming November 2026!
“Jude Marx’s chapbook deserves to join the canon of beloved queer ecology poetics as the reader dives into their deserts and pinks. Marx’s skillful use of imagery, footnotes, queer-inspired form, and much more makes the reader sit with memories of sexual violence, seizures, and memories indicative of budding bodily gender awareness. What an honor to sit with their prodigious contribution in a small set of pages. I encourage all readers to sit with Marx’s offering.”
—Maya Williams, Seventh Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine, ’21–’24, and author of Feminine Morbidity
“In The River the Night Remembers, Jude Marx offers a study in eco-corporeality that gives language to a body whose psychogenic electricity betrays and reveals the constant becoming we are as humans, as interconnected beings. Marx utilizes an inventive formalism, taking received poetic forms and making them bespoke. The “I” in this collection contains multitudes—landscapes and bodies of water—and is intertextual. Through techniques like the golden shovel, the cento, and contrapuntal, the lyric enunciates in blues and purples, amaranth and jacaranda, and from sunflowers grown from a lush self inside a self. Ultimately, these poems function as a reshaping of identity and craft, and the poetic line carries the reader like a river—fluid, rhythmically relentless, and deeply restorative.”
—Arisa White, author of Who’s Your Daddy?
“Entering The River the Night Remembers by Jude Marx is like slipping into an inky body of water—alchemical, unstable, metamorphic. ‘My clavicle is a suitcase for grief/body of water darkened by days of rain.’ Inside the skin of these poems are sweet monsters and defects, shimmering stars and harms. Corporeal tremors and gender, like tide pools, are shifting and undiagnosable. ‘I’d always been a misfit,’ Marx claims, and yet what is misfit but the daily mystery of inhabiting a body where hauntings lurk, desire blooms, and blood is the color of the red dirt of home? Inside this gem of a debut collection are landscapes of place and self, rife with risk, magic and aliveness, the ink of night lake sweet on my palms.”
—Tina Carlson, author of A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery
