NOT YOURS TO DESTROY Paperback – March 26, 2026

I ran into a street screamingHow I need someone to help meMy shirt ripped hanging offMy body like aBloody survey flagNOT YOURS TO DESTROY is a collection comprised of poems by poet Amalie Flynn and paintings by artist Pamela Flynn, and it lands with the force of a reckoning. Exploring sexual assault and the destruction of waterways, this book keeps intertwining, through words and images, the attack on women and the attack on water until the connections feel unavoidable, physical, and lived in. In poems like “CONFLUENCE” and “SEIZING,” bodies become rivers, mouths become basins, and trauma moves with the same relentless pressure as polluted flow. Alongside this, Pamela Flynn’s mixed media work, founded in social and cultural issues, extends the poems into visual space, echoing wetlands that do not get wet and rivers that disappear before ever even reaching that mouth.This is Amalie Flynn’s fifth book with Alien Buddha Press, following FLESH (2023), RIPE (2024), SILICONE (2024), and WATERMELON (2024), and it feels both cumulative and urgent. Pairing Amalie Flynn’s forceful poems with Pamela Flynn’s powerful paintings, NOT YOURS TO DESTROY refuses distance. It insists on witness, on damage named, and on what it means to carry it.Amalie Flynn is a poet and the author of WATERMELON (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), SILICONE (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), RIPE (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), FLESH (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), SEPTEMBER ELEVENTH (Middle West Press, 2021), and WIFE AND WAR: THE MEMOIR (2013). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Time, and many anthologies. She serves as poetry editor for The Wrath-Bearing Tree.Pamela Flynn is a mixed media artist. Her work is founded in social/cultural issues. She holds an MFA from New Jersey City University. She is an exhibiting artist at the Ceres Gallery, NYC, an exhibiting member of The National Association of Women Artists, and a member of The Women’s Caucus for Art. Flynn’s work has been exhibited nationwide and in South Korea. She is a recipient of the 2006 Puffin Foundation Grant for the project Road Shrines: A Peripheral Blur. Her anti gun violence project, Considering Harm, has been exhibited in many cities in the United States. Read more