Biography
Eileen Toomey is the author of How to Make an Espresso Martini (Bottlecap Press, 2026). Her poems and essays appear in The Rumpus, Does It Have Pockets, Flash the Court, Contemporary Haibun Online, and elsewhere.
"Immunotherapy/American Ghazal Helix" won second place in Cleaver Magazine's Form and Form-Breaking contest, judged by Diane Seuss, and earned nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
She teaches at Project Write Now in Red Bank, NJ, and is a Book Inc writer.
New Release
The collection begins with a recipe: 1 shot of Ketel One, Mr. Black's Coffee Liqueur and the ghost of Eileen Toomey's father sitting at the end of the bar. We meet her fierce and funny mother, her loving Gram, meanwhile the methane bubbles from stockyard waste ooze into Bubbly Creek. When she holds her nose, her mother pushes her hand away. "Stop it," she says. "That's just the smell of a hard day's work."
Structured around the three coffee beans dropped into an espresso martini (Health, Wealth, Happiness), this debut chapbook is a memoir in pieces — moving between forms (pantoum, ghazal, haibun, a drink recipe) the way memory moves between years.
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