Rebecca's Reviews > Inconsolable Objects

(4.5) Nancy Miller Gomez’s debut collection recalls a Midwest girlhood of fairground rides and lake swimming; tornadoes and cicadas. But her remembered Kansas is no site of rose-tinted nostalgia. “Missing History” notes how women’s stories, such as her grandmother’s, are lost to time. A pet snake goes missing and she imagines it haunting her mother. And in “Tilt-A-Whirl,” her older sister’s harmless flirtation with a ride operator turns sinister:

we went faster, and faster,
though by then we had begun to scream Stop!

Please stop! Until our voices grew hoarse
beneath the clattering pivots and dips,

the air filling with diesel and cigarettes, and the man
at the control stick, waiting for us

to spin toward him again, and each time he cocked his hand
as if sighting prey down the barrel of a gun.

“Mothering” likewise eschews the cosy for images of fierce protection. The poet documents the death of her children’s father and abides with a son enduring brain scans and a daughter in recovery from heroin addiction. She wreaks “Vengeance” on a cheating husband and lives through her parents’ deaths. Gomez also takes ideas from the headlines, with poems about the Ukraine invasion, species extinction, and an unsolicited dick pic shared via the cloud in a subway car. There is a prison setting in two poems in a row – she has taught Santa Cruz County Jail poetry workshops.

I particularly appreciated “The Invisible Mother,” inspired by the Victorian practice of photographing children with their mothers hidden in the background; “Heavens to Betsy,” concerning her mother’s love of sayings (my mother, too; a favourite exclamation was “Great Caesar’s ghost!”); and “Domain,” about her fascination with her body, even as it ages:

Crow’s feet and cackle lines.
The foundation of my face settling in
for the long haul, each year my body becoming
more and more familiar.

The alliteration and slant rhymes are to die for, and I love the cover (Owl Collage by Alexandra Gallagher) and the frequent bird metaphors. There’s an edge of sadness and danger that reminds me of Lo by Melissa Crowe. I recognized much of the emotional territory of childhood, as I did with Sarah Manguso’s Very Cold People, even if the particulars are very different from my own upbringing. It’s always exciting to discover a writer who sees the world in the same way as I do, and can write about it in gorgeous verse.