Might Kindred

`

Might Kindred

The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry Series

82 pages

eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

November 2022

978-1-4962-3386-8

$17.95 Add to Cart
Paperback

November 2022

978-1-4962-3239-7

$17.95 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

November 2022

978-1-4962-3385-1

$17.95 Add to Cart

About the Book

Eric 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.

Author Bio

Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi living in Philadelphia on unceded Lenni Lenape land. She is the author of the collection Here Is the Night and the Night on the Road and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling. Her poems have appeared in the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day, Waxwing, Adroit Journal, FoglifterBest Small Fictions 2020, and elsewhere. 
 

Praise

"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 Beast