Providence

Heartworm Press is proud to announce Providence, a new collection of poems by Eric Paul.

Nearly two decades after first being published by Heartworm Press, Eric Paul returns with Providence, a powerful new collection that serves as both a literary homecoming and a milestone in the press's history.

Named for both the city that shaped him and the mysterious forces that shape a life, Providence explores family history, addiction, fatherhood, memory, survival, and the strange humor required to endure them. Born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Paul transforms the people, neighborhoods, bars, funeral homes, airports, and anxieties of New England into poems that are devastating, hilarious, surreal, and deeply human.

Throughout the collection, fathers become myths, ghosts wander interstate highways, lawnmowers speak, children teach impossible lessons, and ordinary moments open into something larger and more mysterious. Family history becomes folklore. Survival becomes myth. The familiar world reveals itself to be stranger, funnier, and more haunted than we ever imagined.

For more than two decades, Paul has occupied a singular place in underground literature. As both poet and lyricist, he has built a reputation for work that is ferocious, funny, emotionally devastating, and impossible to mistake for anyone else's. Drawing equally from poetry, punk, autobiography, dark comedy, and American mythology, his work uncovers the extraordinary hidden within ordinary life.

For Heartworm Press, the publication carries special significance. Eric Paul was first published by the press when it was founded in 2008. Seventeen years and more than one hundred titles later, Providence, published as Heartworm Press #139, brings the story back to where it began. The reunion between press and author feels fitting. Both have evolved, endured, and remained fiercely committed to singular voices outside the literary mainstream.

Eric Paul is the author of I Offered Myself As The Sea and A Popular Place To Explode. His work has appeared in Pleiades, Greensboro Review, Ocean State Review, Ninth Letter, Booth, and elsewhere. He serves as Poetry Editor of The Bryant Literary Review, teaches in the Arts & Creative Industries program at Bryant University, and is the vocalist and lyricist for Psychic Graveyard.

With Providence, Paul delivers his most intimate and accomplished collection to date. Drawing from family history, addiction, fatherhood, grief, and the absurdities of everyday survival, these poems move effortlessly between the devastating and the hilarious, the surreal and the painfully real. The result is a collection that feels both deeply personal and startlingly universal.

POEMS FOR THOSE WHO SURVIVED THEIR ORIGIN STORY.

Eric Paul's most powerful collection yet.

First copies include signed bookplates.