Orange

Coming May 5th, 2026 - Books will ship the final week of April
Preorder now!

Through narrative poems and innovative forms, Orange explores the ripple effects of reconciling a lineage of masculinity and queerness, unearthing truth from within lies, and grappling with the complexity of familial influence. Yet, family expands well beyond the nuclear as poems center relationships between friends, cousins, teachers, and partners. Painting a vivid and fraught portrait of the North Bronx, Orange unflinchingly highlights and confronts the contradictions at the heart of love, divorce, gender, religion, and community. Orange ultimately argues that truth resembles color, something so real, yet elusive and impossible to prove. 

Noel Quiñones is an Emmy award-winning Nuyorican writer, educator, and speaker from the Bronx. Their work has been published in Poetry, Boston Review, Poem-a-Day, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT anthology, as well as the Michigan Quarterly Review, for which they won the 2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize. They have also received fellowships from CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, the Poetry Foundation, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and founder of Project X, a Bronx-based spoken word poetry organization, Noel is currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center.

from Annulment

Edged by my mother, he played pretend.
(I never want to know about the Retreat.)

I knew a man when my father retreated
into himself. I swear I had two fathers.

No, a mistake; a father unto himself.
For ten years, she refused to sign it.

For ten years, she signed with his last name.
He said, Lying, like prayer, takes commitment.

Lying, like prayer, takes commitment. She said,
this man never existed at all.

*****

from The Time Capsule

Know Angel trusted me with his life
and if you time a dap just right, you can melt
a shoulder blade into a feather. We all dreamt of wings,
but most of us only ever got an edge to wonder at.
Trust, we never thought we’d make it out, so we hid
something, a real queseyonomejoda, a jabberwocky, dark
matter, Spear of Destiny-type shit. I can’t explain it,
but if you ever find yourself hype off a early dismissal,
one dollar short of a bus to the movie theaters,
I need you to follow the map and dig, and dig,
and dig, and when you hit metal, open it.

Orange is a joyful, heart-thumping, grief-slick, language-sparkling romp through memory and becoming. Every page is humming with the music of what it means to be alive and brown and queer and brilliant in a world that too often forgets to see you whole. Structured around color theory and anchored in a bold love letter to the body’s brightness, these poems navigate family ruptures, first loves, and the ache of moving toward a future full of rowdy song.

—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic

These poems are patient and visceral, familial and mold-breaking. They don’t expect easy answers, but instead shine light on the liminal space between guilt and innocence, individuality and community, connection and isolation. Orange pulses with place and honors that “no two / Bronxes are the same.” From the many saints of Norwood to parental monologues clawing at catharsis, this debut is both an archive and a testament. It asks anew the questions we all at some point need to face: Where do I come from? Who has it made me? And who have I made myself?

—Jon Sands, author of It’s Not Magic

Orange challenges us to render visible what we aim to hide and reveals the kind of fun we have when we let ourselves create dangerously. These poems read like in-person, figurative epiphanies, like gorgeous tableaus: a palette’s “thousands of unnamed colors” that cut to the white meat of truth. This is where we learn our manhood lessons—in the absence of men, with a voice raising us somewhere in the distance, in a trap of sexual desires—confused and conflicted while playing hide-and-seek and foraging avenues with stumbled-upon joy. Or, as Quiñones writes, “Such small skin / we fed upon, thinking we couldn’t / get caught.” Salute to this poet of abundance who understands that all those spaces where we once fronted are exhausted, and those narrative strategies where we tall tale ourselves into myths have expired. Orange is a pathway to freedom that starts with our courage to dance under a rainbow without being afraid to utter the word love.

—Willie Perdomo, author of Smoking Lovely: The Remix, winner of the PEN Open Book Award

May 2026
112 pp
Trade paper – 7.25 X 9.5"
$21
ISBN 978-1-960327-20-8
Emerging Voices