Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez
YesYes Books, 2024
Nancy Miller Gomez’s new book Inconsolable Objects is dedicated “to all the women whose stories were never told,” and her work grips the reader immediately as she opens with a feminist gut-punch of a poem titled “Snapshot”:
I was a hand grenade of a girl
vacuum packed into a dress
that bound my body
like a bandage staunching a wound.
The poem closes with a rallying image for all women who are told to smile or to do better: “That’s still me in the photo, / waiting to pull the pin.” Gomez’s work is full of compassion, grittiness, and bereavement; it is also galvanizing as she quotes the New York Times noting that “researchers have estimated that women’s stories make up just .5% of recorded history.” As if to make up for all that historical silencing, Gomez writes poems that you want to get out of the way for. Poems where
no barbed wire, no border,
no palisade will hold the girl
this terrible love hath wrought.
Poems where sisters move “through carnival music and catcalls” and “The cage of a man’s face settles into a smile.” The metaphorical terrain of Inconsolable Objects also contains “Lonely men who smelled of wet fur and whiskey,” “tract homes that cropped up like winter wheat,” a cheating husband, the death of a mother, and “the disarticulated skeleton of a barn owl.” While Gomez acknowledges our brokenness as a species, asking the reader “how do we keep on?” she also gently reminds us that persistence is beautiful and that “all the atoms in our bodies were once inside a star.”
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Simone Muench is a recipient of an NEA fellowship and the author of seven full-length books, including Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande; winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize), Wolf Centos (Sarabande), and The Under Hum, cowritten with Jackie K. White (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Recent collaborative poems are forthcoming in NAR, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, swamp pink, phoebe, and elsewhere.