Join us as we celebrate the release of Hell Yeah, Rachelle Toarmino’s highly anticipated second collection of poems. She will be joined by Aidan Ryan, Zubair Ahmed, Christopher Diaz, and Jeff Alessandrelli
About Hell Yeah
An intimate, ecstatic examination of the wonders of common speech. As automatic and wholehearted as a hell yeah between friends, the poems interject into various sites of the interpersonal-from a work email and doctor's office to a long-distance call and Yahoo! Answers rabbit hole — to measure the strange, mundane, and ancient ways we relate and respond to one another. In an alternating rhythm of logic and lyric, doubt and doubling down, Toarmino regifts plain and inherited language to arrive at a theory for familiarity and something like faith: how we know what we know and why we share what we know. With curiosity, generosity, oddball intellect, and charm, Hell Yeah captures that gut impulse to feel yes, say so, and sing it.
Rachelle Toarmino is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025) and That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020), as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science (Sixth Finch Books, 2025), winner of the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Poets.org, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Southeast Review, The Slowdown, and Omnidawn, which awarded her its 2024 Single Poem Broadside Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor in chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo
Aidan Ryan is the author of I Am Here You Are Not I Love You (University of Iowa Press, 2025), and the director and producer of a short documentary film of the same name. His writing has appeared in Public Books, The Millions, The White Review, Lit Hub, Colorado Review, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies Conversations with George Saunders, Best New Poets 2019, and Silo City Reading Series: Ten Years of Poems in Grain Silos. He is the publisher of Foundlings Press and senior editor at Traffic East. He lives in Buffalo, New York.
Zubair Ahmed is a Bengali-American poet. He is the author of City of Rivers, published in the McSweeney’s Poetry Series, and a chapbook, Ashulia, published by Tavern Books. His works have appeared in Poetry, Tin House, The Believer among others. He lives in and works from Portland, OR.
Christopher Diaz is an indigenous CHamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). As a writer, performer, and photographer, he has been featured by NBC news, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Poets & Writers.org, and more. He is a two-time grand slam champion of Houston’s slam poetry team, “Write About Now,” which ranked fifth in the nation in 2018, and he won first place at the 2023 Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam festival with his PNW team. He has previously taught poetry and performance with the non-profit, "Writers in the Schools,” and offers free and paid writing workshops in Portland and Vancouver. You can find him at www.christopherdiazcreates.com.
Jeff Alessandrelli is the author of seven books, most recently the novel And Yet (Future Tense, 2024). His poetry and prose have been published in The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. His reviews and interviews in Bomb Magazine, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, Rain and more. He also directs the nonprofit book press/record label Fonograf Editions.