Public House

Public House maps the delirious landscapes of addiction. In poem after poem, Dylan Weir chronicles the mix of memory and mythology concocted between last call and first light. Between oblivion and sobriety. Between the pull of the bottle and the harder seductions of hope. Part dive bar karaoke part confession booth breakdown, Weir writes with the rhythm of someone who’s counted days, lost count, and started over too many times to count. Who’s learned recovery isn’t a straight line but a mobius strip. A roundabout on which one must meet and lose many different versions of one’s self.

Forthcoming October, 2026.

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Advance Praise

Dylan Weir's Public House is just that: a place of gathering, of storytelling, of last calls. But it's also like sharing the last smoke of the night with a friend after everyone else has gone home and the street is quiet, the air cool, and the truth being spoken changes you. These poems are fresh, intimate, sometimes wild, self-examining, and always generous. Public House is a book to be passed back and forth between friends as the evening turns into day.

Matthew Dickman

In Dylan Weir’s poignant debut collection, Public House, sometimes “giving up too late is the only way out.“ These poems gracefully yet truthfully chronicle the fight for sobriety as the speaker journeys through darkest dark back up into the light, “my old mistakes like moss gathered on a nurse log.” Ultimately, Weir’s is a poetry of transformation. With each line, Public House earns every bit of the praise embedded in the words hard-won.

Quan Barry

Out of the death-life of drugs and drinking, Dylan Weir has learned you should always tell the truth. In the blur of his urge for happiness, he is hurt, reproachful, unambiguous, broken, and empathetic. It’s what beauty is, and what poetry is supposed to be. It’s the book’s brilliance and pathos that poem to poem, like the poet, we readers find ourselves suddenly lucky and alive. In Public House, as if we live his life and our own, we feel with Weir, “I hope you know what a gift this is, these words that never should have existed.”

Chris Solis Green

Selected Publications

Bambi — Best New Poets 2024 (available on Amazon)

In the Land of Long Distances — Narrative Magazine

Second Harvest — Rhino Poetry Journal

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