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A New Type of Breakfast by Elizabeth Mateer

Name: A New Type of Breakfast by Elizabeth Mateer
SKU: 184703
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Original price was: $17.99.Current price is: $15.99.

In her startlingly brave book A New Type of Breakfast, Elizabeth Mateer muses on the “undoing” when “the last bit of hope is scraped out like the last bit of softboiled egg.” This poet understands that when salty tears tumble into tea, invincible women drink that stuff down and pull themselves up. I smiled and straightened my spine on experiencing how she paints the resilient women in her family. Mateer lives in the land where Passion constantly wakes to the possibility of self-obliteration but goes about its day anyhow, rising from the relief of breathing in the “scent of decay” while moving fearlessly toward the “magic to come.” She whispers to us about secret intimacy that allows a lover to see into their love’s soul from six thousand miles away. This is the brand of affection everyone, I mean everyone, craves. When this poet tells you, “I am happy to be at the limits of my emotional well,” dive in with her. Don’t think. Dive.

–Dana Kinsey, Lancaster City Poet Laureate, Author of Mixtape Venus and Before & Afterglows

In A New Type of Breakfast, ruins burn and houses crack open like sternums; teapots shatter in tandem with hearts; atoms ache for their lost counterparts across galaxies. These poems map and traverse the fragile architecture of love, faith, memory, and survival; each piece steeped in both obliteration and rebirth.

Elizabeth’s use of language is both intimate and unflinching, the collection moves between the sacred and the mundane, between the weight of inheritance and the fleeting beauty of the present moment. A grandmother’s teapot abandoned at Goodwill, the green eyes of a lover holding the universe, the hollow sweetness of spun sugar morality-all become touchstones in a search for meaning; to return home not unchanged, but remade; to find in undoing the possibility of “a new type of breakfast.”

–Erwin Arroyo Pérez, Founder & EIC of The Poetry Lighthouse

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A New Type of Breakfast

by Elizabeth Mateer

Paper

(“Cover art by Elise Bagnoli — www.elisebagnoliart.com | Instagram: @elisebagnoliart)

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This title will be released on July 24, 2026

A New Type of Breakfast traces the long aftermath of early hurt and the ways neglect, loss, and silence shape us long after the original damage has passed. The title poem marks a breaking point: the dissolution of hope, followed by the quiet possibility of a new beginning.

From this undoing emerges a sharper moral clarity. The poems confront hypocrisy in institutions, in relationships, and in the stories we tell ourselves. Yet growth is not linear. Even with insight, we lapse. Longing persists. The tension between knowing better and still feeling deeply runs through the middle of the collection, where nostalgia, grief, and unresolved attachment surface without apology.

Gradually, space opens. The poems begin to imagine trust again, not as certainty, but as risk. An encounter reshapes the understanding of what goodness, safety, and intimacy can look like. This moment becomes a turning point, expanding what feels possible.

What follows is a season of intensity and release: desire, fantasy, disillusionment, and letting go. As the external world shifts, so does the inner one. Creativity returns. Ancestry and memory surface. Childhood wonder reappears, not as regression, but as reconnection.

The collection closes with a sense of arrival. Not a tidy resolution, but a steadier ground: coming home to oneself with more solidity, more compassion, and more truth than before.

Elizabeth Mateer is the author of the poetry collection Searching for Home (The Poetry Box, 2024). Her work has appeared in Arcana Poetry Press, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Radical Catalyst Art & Literary Journal, and Four Tulips Press, among others. Additionally, she is an editor and Italian translator for The Poetry Lighthouse. She earned her BA in Creative Writing from Hunter College and holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology.

Instagram: @elizabeth_mateer