Part cautionary tale, part love letter to the broken objects and people of the world, Inconsolable Objects is driven by the search for beauty in the forsaken. Gomez offers poems that are a call and response to all of us stumbling towards connection and offer a hopeful glimpse into the mysteries of our shared experience.
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
Inconsolable Objects 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. — 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. Her writing is complex and real and strange and beautiful—I can’t say how much it moves me. — Dorianne Laux
Part cautionary tale, part love letter to the broken objects and people of the world, Inconsolable Objects is driven by the search for beauty in the forsaken. Gomez offers poems that are a call and response to all of us stumbling towards connection and offer a hopeful glimpse into the mysteries of our shared experience.
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
Inconsolable Objects 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. — 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. Her writing is complex and real and strange and beautiful—I can’t say how much it moves me. — Dorianne Laux