Inconsolable Objects

Part cautionary tale, part love letter to the broken objects and people of this world, Inconsolable Objects is driven by the search for beauty in the forsaken. The poems are populated with sentient tornados, fetal mice floating in a snow globe, soldiers marching past a disembodied heart, and birds that have learned to imitate the sound of an AK47. In her spectacular debut, Gomez offers a call and response to all of us stumbling towards connection. These poems witness, interrogate, mourn, praise, and provide a hopeful glimpse into the mysteries of our shared experience.

About the Author :
Nancy Miller Gomez is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books, 2024) and the chapbook Punishment (Rattle chapbook series). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, The Rumpus, Massachusetts Review, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails and Juvenile Hall. She received her J.D. from the University of San Diego and her MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. She has worked as a waitress, a stable hand, an attorney, and a tv producer. She lives with her family in Santa Cruz, California. More at: nancymillergomez.com.

Review :
In Inconsolable Objects, Nancy Miller Gomez writes from within shadow. She writes doubt and exhalation and loss. With an enviable lyrical assurance, she writes brilliantly of the moments we convince ourselves we've forgotten, those wide insistent moments that confound and challenge us as parent, as spouse, as daughter or son, as human. To read this revelatory work is to lose yourself in its muscled melody, its courage, its resounding truths. Inconsolable Objects is a debut that will rattle the rafters. - Patricia Smith "Lining my memories up against the wall" with vivid, visceral detail, Nancy Miller Gomez deftly captures the struggle to orient oneself in a disorienting world. Inconsolable Objects is a collection of shadows "re-remembered"--the shadow of family, of addiction, of "a rusty, war-weary single mothership / carved of teeth and tenacity." This is also a collection of survival, transporting us into the experience of the speaker with Gomez's keen ability to sketch a character via a precise gesture or two. In skillfully observed portraits, the poet shines an unsparing light on father, mother, child. She faces complex truths and concludes, "I like to think there is part of me / that isn't afraid." This is a vital voice full of hard-earned compassion and wisdom, mixing memory with ferocity in ways that will make you gasp at this "hand grenade of a girl." - Ellen Bass Nancy Miller Gomez writes about the heroic business of being alive in a world that mostly doesn't see or acknowledge our essential aloneness. It's not the grand gesture or the death-defying act, but the daily going on. Her poems, like the basement tapes of Bob Dylan and The Band, conjure up that strange and wonderful "Old Weird America." Her writing is complex and real and strange and beautiful-I can't say how much it moves me. - Dorianne Laux