How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse by Osmani Ochoa is the third chapbook in Abode's 2025-2026 lineup and is officially available for pre-order! All orders will be shipped by early Auguest. There are only 100 copies of this chapbook available, so make sure to get your copy while you can! Request to review this book here.
Book Description:
For readers who carry deep political conviction, live with chronic illness, or know the ache of loss and longing, How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse is a poetry chapbook that offers an intimate meditation on being human, and how breath—and breathlessness—reminds us that we are alive.
About the Author: Osmani R. Ochoa is a queer Mexican-Xicano poet and longtime local and national organizer for immigrant and worker rights. Their migrant futurist writing addresses themes of immigration, queerness, and borders and appears in Not Your Papi’s Utopia: Latinx Visions of Radical Hope; (Mouthfeel Press) and Xicanxfuturism: Gritos for Tomorrow (Riot of Roses Publishing).
Praise for How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse
“In How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse, Ochoa masterfully merges violence, love, the physical body, and the earth into an undeniable crisis of breath. At the center of these poems is resistance against the future of this planet and of the speaker’s body—how amidst all this destruction there is love. Throughout these pages, we inhale and exhale history, borders, desire, and fire as each page is a leap into the next moment where every ‘Birth of a new ending / I was resurrected again.’ These poems remind us that where we begin and end are at the heart of survival.”
—Saúl Hernández, How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024)
“Órale. From Hernán Cortes to Hurricane Harvey, from Los Bukis to Primer Impacto, brace for the first impact of Osmani R. Ochoa’s brilliant translingual debut. With heart-wrenching depth and ingenious humor, these poems are a gorgeous blend of pop culture nostalgia and luminous futurist gadgetry. This is a world where traditional remedios like copal and lemongrass coexist with lung bio USB chips and nano-inhalers. There is hope and healing here para nuestra gente. Adelante, Osmani.”
—Violeta Garza, Brava (First Matter Press, 2025)
“Ochoa’s poems take us through landscapes of survival, resistance, and hope. Each poem aches and yearns for the promise of full and unhindered breath as only someone who knows this battle can. The collection explores the connections between outer and inner existence, between bodies, souls, land, and the external forces that seek to suffocate and subjugate life. The possibility of a new dream and a new reality are bolstered by the bonds of family, love, and community.”
—César L. De León, Speaking with Grackles by Soapberry Trees (FlowerSong, 2021)
“‘Maybe it’s everything / my lungs (and heart) / Can’t take’. In How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse, the body and the Earth are examined as twin sites of destruction and repair. Fissuring tectonic plates, tornadoes rotating in the chest. The body traverses ruin, wades through loss, abandonment and cataclysm to find a space of repair, mapping futurisms ‘free of international / Boundaries and colonial conquests’. Colonialism, border walls, racial violence: these are only some of the forces that stifle the breath. They are counteracted by intimacy, connection, and a will to exist on shifting foundations. Hope is located in ancient wisdom, in tenderness and radical dreaming, in ‘Cuauhtemoc’s prophecy / that the Sun will shine again’. The child bed bound in recovery longs to be filled with air; this book explores the tension of that longing while asserting that every breath taken is a form of strength.”
—Sara Daniele Rivera, The Blue Mimes (Graywolf Press, 2024)
“To read Osmani R. Ochoa’s fittingly titled, artistically sophisticated, and admirably self-aware debut collection of poetry, How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse, is to breathe—at times, with relief at times with exasperation—and to even (and often) stop breathing, so arresting are so many of the lines therein: “My index finger / Presses the canister / One more time / Dismantling wall / Of bronchial tubes.” Or “I'd return / to end the climate crisis / or avert an alien attack / for you. / Knowing / you probably / wouldn't / do the same, / for / me.” And, in the case of the Spanish: “de un pulmón al otro / --mientras el mundo se desmoronó / --como si eso fuese lo único / que nos mantenía vivos.” An ecopoetic critique, a radical affirmation of queer existence through respiratory language and imagery (for what is more radical than breathing, living?), a rich contribution to bilingual poetry (not to mention so much else), Ochoa’s debut poetry collection is irreducible to any one thing. However, it is so many things. It is a timely, necessary read. And worth every single breath.”
—Jonathan Fletcher, This is My Body (Northwestern University Press, 2025)
Publication Date: 7/31/2026
Copies will officially be distributed in early August.
