Description
Book SynopsisEric Hoffer Book Award Category Finalist
The poems of
Might Kindred wonder aloud: can we belong to one another, and “can a people belong to a dreaming machine?” Conjuring mountains and bodies of water, queer and immigrant poetics, beloveds both human and animal, Mónica Gomery explores the intimately personal and the possibility of a collective voice. Here anthems are sung and fall apart midsong. The speaker exchanges letters with her ancestors, is visited by a shadow sister, and interrogates what it means to make a home as a first-generation American.
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, the poems in
Might Kindred are rooted in the body and its cousins, seeking the possibility of kinship, “in case we might kindness, might ardor together.” Belonging and unbelonging are claimed as part of the same complicated whole, and Gomery’s intersections reach for something divine at the center.
Trade Review"These generous and sensitive meditations on belonging and the first-generation experience cast intimate light on shared human experiences."—
Publishers Weekly“What I found in this collection is not only an invitation to belong, but a reassurance that the self has always been unequivocally whole even if we must journey forward and back through time to come to that understanding.”—S.M. Badawi,
Waxwing Magazine“Into this collection’s longing arms Gomery gathers all matter of kin and all kin of matter: landscapes, stones, ‘unsiblings,’ creation myths, God, language, home, bodies, soil, dignity, ‘jagged verges,’ mirrors, and eyes. She grapples: What are we to do in a world where loss is certain, time is defiant, and the self aches to transcend its borders? Instead of offering us synthetic answers Gomery’s poems arrive ‘bare skinned on the bridge between thinking and knowing.’ This book is an invitation, a constellation, a map. We are lucky, lucky victims of its grandeur.”—Shira Erlichman, author of
Odes to Lithium “‘If you take a child to the mountain,’ writes Mónica Gomery in
Might Kindred, ‘do not expect the mountain to not live inside the child.’ Reader, you and I are the child. This collection is the mountain. Expect nothing less than to be forever changed.”—Nicole Sealey, author of
Ordinary BeastTable of ContentsSelf-Portrait with Airplane Turbulence
Theology
Emblanquecer
Immigrant Elegy for Ávila
Family Is an Illumination of Shoulders
Ghazal for a First Lover
Might Kindred
Prologue
When My Sister Visits
Here
God Queers the Mountain
It Isn’t Easy to Speak
Falling Out
A Poem with Two Memories of Venezuela
Letter to Myself from My Great Grandmother
Origin Stories
Abecedario
When My Sister Visits
After Pulse
The Synagogue Membership Assembles to Discuss the Fascist Presidency
Imaginative Exercise in the Study of Epigenetics
Dendrochronology of Hair
Ode to the Poop Bag
The Oldest Form of Prayer
Now We Live Together
Because It Is Elul
When My Sister Visits
We Thanked Her by Digging a Hole
Fragments of an Anthem
Banishing Loneliness
Here
A Poem About a Book About Venezuela
Sleeping in Hurricane Season
Emblanquecer
Ghazal for a Year
Halleluyah
We Walked Dahlias to Her Front Porch
I Thought I Was Done Writing About My Dead
Ghazal for God & Wellbutrin
The Poet Considers If Her Body Belongs to Her
When My Sister Visits
Here
Love Letter
Acknowledgments
Notes
