The Limerence Object by Mya Matteo Alexice

Limited edition print copy from the 2025 Garden Party Chapbook Contest!
Shipping in Fall 2025!
cover art: Tarot 6 by Ignacio Cobo

A daring excavation of desire, trauma, and the messy beauty of queer attachment. Alexice’s poems are electric with yearning, vulnerability, and erotic honesty. The Limerence Object doesn’t flinch—it confesses and reclaims. A masterclass in lyric intimacy, this collection is as cerebral as it is carnal, and utterly spellbinding.

Mya / Matteo Alexice is a Black and white graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA. A Cave Canem fellow and academic studying Black romantic life, they are the author of A Shape We’ve Yet to Name (2024) and The Limerence Object (2025). Matteo’s poems can be found in publications such as Pleiades, swamp pink, Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, diode, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Bennington Review, Honey Literary and elsewhere. They’ve received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center, and more. They were the runner-up in the 2023 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest judged by Gary Soto. He enjoys video games where you can make the characters kiss.

Praise for The Limerence Object:

Mya Matteo Alexice’s poems sing through the troubled taxonomies of silence, askingthe language to stitch a wound around the apparition of gender, the shame of sexualviolence, or the insistence of obsession. The Limerence Object lets loose “a wave fortongues,” to reckon with how love makes us all multi-dimensional portals for memory. Here is a chapbook that is equal parts sensual, sensitive, and soulful, and here is a poetwhose sensibilities are second to none.

-Steven Leyva, The Opposite of Cruelty

Staggeringly tender, Mya Matteo Alexice’s The Limerence Object rings with brave vulnerability. The narrative of an “ethical slut” who “loved / so hard and so in error” is one that requires deft balance, and Alexice approaches that tightrope with both tension and harmony. There is a beautiful sense of generosity in these poems: faults are presented with empathy, mistakes with forgiveness. This collection left me wanting to be “witnessed like how animals / see other animals: without shame.” Mya Matteo Alexice is an impressive and singular voice.

-Saba Keramati, Self-Mythology