BODYPOLITIC by Aerik Francis is the second chapbook in Abode's 2025-2026 lineup and is officially available for pre-order! All orders will be shipped by mid March. There are only 100 copies of this chapbook available, so make sure to get your copy while you can!
Book Description:
If radical means to the root, radical politics must attend to the body.
Written for the vast spectrum of bodies, Aerik Francis’s BODYPOLITIC offers poetry as a catalyst: for movement, for empowerment, and for liberation-minded education rooted in global awareness and local action. This collection of poems questions what it means to live fully inside one’s own body in a society that seeks to regulate, define, or erase bodies. These poems ask readers to reexamine their relationship with their bodies as an act of self-knowledge, resistance, and radical permission to express oneself. Beyond the individual self, BODYPOLITIC also explores how bodies exist within larger bodies of power. Embedded in the history of these political processes are people, Francis’s people, the vast history of peoples fighting against oppressive powers and systems. BODYPOLITIC opens space for a candid conversation with ourselves about what we want, who we are becoming, and who we really want to be.
About the Author: Aerik Francis is a Queer Black Latinx poet born and based on the lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples currently known as Denver, Colorado, USA. Aerik is currently the poet laureate of Adams County, Colorado. Aerik wants us to come together and gum up the gears of the machinery of the empire toward all of our collective liberation. Their poetry chapbook MISEDUCATION (New Delta Review, 2023) can be purchased online or in person, and their newest poetry chapbook BODYPOLITIC out now with Abode Press in 2026. Find more of their work on their website phaentompoet.com or via social media @phaentompoet.
Praise for BODYPOLITIC
“BODYPOLITIC is an urgent love letter filled with the poems that bring us closer together – closer to the speaker, closer to ourselves. Rich with candor, humor, rage, joy, and flesh, this collection looks closely at what a body can do, who a body can be, what a body costs, and what a body holds. Francis’ voice is compelling, sharp, and tender, inviting the readers to consider our own bodies as well as our collective body through experiments in form, allusions to other bodies of work, and all the ways our bodies impact our experiences. These poems are gripping, delicious, and luxurious to read.”
- Suzi Q. Smith, author of A Gospel of Bones & Poems for the End of the World
“Where in the poem is the body? In BODYPOLITIC Aerik Francis’ poetic crooning, textured heart & deeply moving wonderments answer: everywhere. The work is precise in its language, forthright and deliberate. Whether they are asking: am I a body? or where is the lie? Aerik’s work begs the reader to wage war on everything this world has asked us to call beautiful—to call true. It insists we push past the boundaries of white-ness, ableism and fatphobia & eradicate it by getting to our center—more precious & more human. The world beneath the world, the steady beating of our existence as a species—our survival depends on ushering this forward. & this new earth is queer, is bold, is Black, is bountiful, yet it begins within each of us. 'there will be / no more sighs upon our size' they state & this is an invitation for all to take up more space, break free of the constraints a society places on us. What happens to a people when they cannot be commodified or labeled? Liberation. This collection is a call to many things, but let’s start with loving ourselves fiercely. As the poet writes: I bite back and it frees me.”
–Yesenia Montilla, author of The Pink Box & Muse Found in a Colonized Body
ISBN: 979-8-9900598-9-4
40 pages
Publication Date: 3/1/2026
Copies will officially be distributed in early March.
