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Today's poem is "House of Freaks"
from Inconsolable Objects

YesYes Books

Nancy Miller Gomez's is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books) and the chapbook, Punishment (Rattle chapbook series), a collection of poems and essays about her experience teaching in prisons and jails. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, River Styx, Waxwing, Plume, The Rumpus, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology. 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 lives with her family in Santa Cruz, California.

Other poems by Nancy Miller Gomez in Verse Daily:
March 30, 2024:   "Resurrection" "When I was five my brother convinced me..."
August 20, 2018:   "Discovering Colors in Prison" "Do they ever disbpj682 new colors? he asks..."

Other poems on the web by Nancy Miller Gomez:
"Coachwhip"
"How Are We Doing?"
"Punishment"
"Tilt-A-Whirl"
"Growing Apples"
"Punishment"

Nancy Miller Gomez's Website.

Nancy Miller Gomez on Twitter.

About Inconsolable Objects:

"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



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