Description
No Lace Fronts in Iowa City
Poems by Meghan Malachi
ISBN: 978-1-963695-69-4 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-70-0 ebook $9.99
June 16, 2026
RUNNER-UP FOR THE 2024 ARTHUR SMITH POETRY PRIZE
In her debut collection, No Lace Fronts in Iowa City, Meghan Malachi explores how community, desirability, and notions of home influence the journeys by which girls come of age. These poems celebrate a South Bronx childhood and navigate a complicated womanhood in the Midwest through confessional musings on Black Latinx identity and intimate epistolary interludes. Favorite wigs, main character moments, and reimagined anti-heroines are all vessels for exploring girlhood in this love letter to female kinship. No Lace Fronts in Iowa City is ultimately a testament to the desires for belonging and tenderness that we all harbor.
Praise for No More Lace Fronts in Iowa City
Meghan Malachi’s debut talks about wigs, but like any wig, these poems move as clever subversion atop perceptions of beauty, vulnerability, and bonds that women share. These quiet, deep admissions are delivered as odes, prose poems, Bronx memories, and most dearly, poems starting with “Girl, I…” because calling someone “Girl” can convey so much. These poems are relief unpinned from a tender scalp.—Tara Betts, author of Refuse to Disappear
You can often find what lies at the heart of a book by repetition, poem series that anchor us and pull us back toward that center. In Meghan Malachi’s No Lace Fronts in Iowa City, the “Girl, I—” poems constantly remind us of the sanctity of Black female friendship and Black womanhood. In a world that doesn’t prioritize the mental health of Black women, that cuts at the very fabric of Black women’s self-esteem, what is required for survival? A good wig that can be thrown on and off at a moment’s notice. A good, intimate gossip session. A friend on the phone, making sure we’ve eaten, watching us finally rise from our beds.—Taylor Byas, author of Resting Bitch Face
Say you open a book of poems and discover a voice so familiar that you’re certain you know whom it belongs to even though you’ve never heard anyone or anything speak about the world that way. Say you swear you know the cities and streets, sky and earth, nights and days, names and faces in the poems like the back of your hand, but the voice knows them in ways you’ve never imagined or noticed before. Say you believe you’ve seen, felt, thought, and said it all but maybe not as wildly, honestly, or unashamedly. Say you realize the voice is familiar because it is so humbly human. Then say the voice belongs to Meghan Malachi.—Mark Turcotte, Illinois Poet Laureate, author of Exploding Chippewas
No Lace Fronts in Iowa City is a homecoming: a celebration of girlhood, of women and their wisdom, of wigs, of the Bronx and Puerto Rico all at once. Malachi’s powerful poetic voice is real and raw in its honesty, its careful attention to the everyday, and its embodiment of femininity in all its richness and complexity. “Girl I—” poems braid the collection like sisters in each other’s hair: Malachi whispers secrets and consejos as she invites you to sit beside her on the plastic-covered couch and talk. These poems are beautiful offerings that you’ll want to read again and again.—Janel Pineda, author of Lineage of Rain
About the Author
Meghan Malachi is a poet and writer from The Bronx, New York. She Meghan Malachi is a poet from The Bronx, New York. She is the first-place winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review 2022 Editor’s Prize Contest and runner-up of the 2024 Princemere Poetry Prize. Her collection No Lace Fronts in Iowa City was selected by Allison Joseph as runner-up for Madville’s 2024 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. Her chapbook The Autodidact was published by Ethel Zine & Micro Press. Meghan has an MS in Mathematics from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing from DePaul University. She is an associate editor at RHINO and lives in Chicago, Illinois.
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