REVERSE MIGRATION: not coming home
Poems of a Michigan Farmhouse and a Childhood in the Long-Gone Midwest
Free Verse & Prose Poems
by Leah Angstman
Product Details:
◑ Title: REVERSE MIGRATION: not coming home
◑ Author: Leah Angstman
◑ Release Date: Winter 2025
◑ Print ISBN: Coming Soon
◑ Ebook ISBN: Coming Soon
◑ 6 x 9 Perfectbound
◑ Cream Paper, # Pages
◑ Cover Art: TK
◑ Poetry | Free Verse | Prose Poems | Also contains: Illustrations, Haiku, Rhyming Couplets
◑ Subjects: Midwest, Childhood, Michigan, Rural, Home, Hometown, Sense of Place
◑ Regional Interest: Author from Michigan; author resides in Colorado; book focuses on small-town Michigan primarily, and the rest of the Midwest secondarily, with poems about all of the Midwestern states
◑ Loudoun County Library Foundation Poetry Award Winner
◑ Able Muse Book Award Finalist (judged by author Charles Martin)
◑ Southeast Missouri State University Cowles Poetry Book Prize Finalist
◑ Ashland Poetry Press Richard Snyder Memorial Prize Finalist
◑ Saluda River Prize for Poetry Two-Time Top-10 Finalist (judged by poet Ray McManus and South Carolina poet laureate Marjory Heath Wentworth)
◑ Bluebonnet Review Poetry Contest Top-10 Finalist
◑ Willow Run Poetry Book Award Semifinalist
◑ Inlandia Institute Hillary Gravendyk Prize Longlist
Expected Release: Winter 2025
She stands square and Midwestern-proud, as those old farmhouses do. Her acres are ever-decreasing with the expansion of the local surroundings, eateries and an airstrip, a granary that added a new elevator, a parcel purchased for maple syrup tapping. But back in the 1840s, this Michigan farmhouse was state-of-the-art, with newspaper in the foundation for insulation, muntin-paned windows of custom cuts, and a wrought-iron archway leading to the fields of wheat and corn, stables with horses.
When Leah Angstman’s parents told her they were selling the farmhouse in which she was raised, the poet and novelist embarked on a decade-long odyssey to document the loss, starting with the purely personal and expanding outward, until what formed was a collection that bore the fruit of a region: what it means to be Midwestern. REVERSE MIGRATION: NOT COMING HOME lends a funneled look from the wider region, the individual states, down to Michigan as a whole, down to the author’s county, town, then singular farmhouse in all her blueprints, ending with an in-depth look at the Midwesterner herself, and all that plants us in a region and keeps us rooted long after our roots are yanked from thirsting soil.
This book is any Middle American—all of us—heading home, and always leaving again.
Content Warning: This book contains some depictions of ugly and condemning regional history.
Leah Angstman is a transplanted Michigander currently living in Boulder. She is the author of the novel OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA (Regal House Publishing, 2022), which won 29 awards, including the CIPA Evvy gold for historical fiction, Herb Tabak Choice Award for fiction, and New England Society Book Award for fiction, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Reading the West Book Awards for debut and IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards for best new voice in fiction. Her second book, SHOOT THE HORSES FIRST (Kernpunkt Press, 2023), was the Indie Author Project’s Colorado adult fiction winner and IPNE overall Fiction of the Year winner, and has won 23 awards, including the Shorts Award for Americana fiction, Next Generation Indie Book Award gold for short stories, and National Indie Excellence Awards Juror’s Choice and gold for short stories, as well as being named a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Awards for best western short fiction, Reading the West Book Awards for fiction, and Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Leah’s third book, the novel FALCON IN THE DIVE (Regal House Publishing, 2024), was recently honored with 9 awards, including the Next Generation Indie Book Awards gold for second novel and being shortlisted for the Hawthorne Prize and CIPA Evvy for both historical fiction and thrillers/suspense. Leah’s latest novel, THE ONLY WAY TO CHEAT A HANGMAN (Past Imperfect, 2026), was a finalist in the Faulkner–Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for novels, and Laramie Book Awards for Americana and pioneer fiction. Her first poetry collection, REVERSE MIGRATION: NOT COMING HOME (Augustan Age, 2025), was honored with 9 awards, including the Loudoun Library Foundation Poetry Award and being a finalist for the Cowles Poetry Book Prize, Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, Able Muse Book Award judged by Charles Martin; and Saluda River Prize for Poetry judged by poet Ray McManus and South Carolina poet laureate Marjory Heath Wentworth. Leah’s second collection of poetry is THE SIGHS OF WOMEN BECOMING (Augustan Age, 2026). She is the founder and executive editor of Boulder-based Alternating Current Press and The Coil online magazine, and she copyedits for Mother Jones. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nashville Review. You can find her at leahangstman.com and on social media as @leahangstman.
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Praise
“Leah Angstman’s vigorous collection, Reverse Migration: not coming home, is a Naming, a hymnal for those individuals who’ve been bred and abandoned by region, by place. Her poems are deft, contemplative, and bursting with image and land-memory. They consider how place as Home is both immutable and yet untouchable, asking the reader to reconcile a brief life animated within it.”
—Lydia Renfro, editor at The Blue Nib
“Imagine your bones as the weight-bearing walls of your childhood home. Imagine a piece of land so integral to your history, to how you define yourself, that it is somehow sacred—as if the roots within it push through the soil under your feet and become the veins inside of you. This is the revelatory exploration of Midwestern culture found in Leah Angstman’s Reverse Migration: not coming home. Angstman’s poetry examines the Midwesterner and Midwestern life from historical, cultural, and personal perspectives. Somewhere, in the deeper, blacker earth of these poems, an intensely personal introspection on the concept of home takes place—what it means at the time in life you choose to leave it, and how we define it when we find that home, as we knew it, may not be there waiting for us.”
—Robin Sinclair, author of Letters to My Lover from Behind Asylum Walls
