Review by Jeanne Yu
Nancy Miller Gomez’s dazzling debut poetry collection, Inconsolable Objects exposes the unsuspecting inconsolable objects we are born as and those we create in our human path as women and mothers. Gomez challenges boundaries, words push against the white spaces with meaning, in an exploration of what words can do in form, language and no-holds-barred images that invite our minds to wrestle with this culture that is inexplicably us. Her relentless artistic balance of musicality and rhythm plays against a backdrop of cognitive dissonance, creating visceral tension wound up and ready to explode.
The collection begins with a persona poem, “Snapshot,”
I was a hand grenade of a girl
vacuum packed into a dress
that bound my body
like a bandage staunching a wound.
and takes us to the carnival of objectification in a culture that normalizes it, in “Tilt-A-Whirl,”
the fabric of my sister’s shirt clinging
to the swinging globes of her breasts
as we went faster, and faster,
though we had begun to scream Stop!
…
the air filling with diesel and cigarettes, and the man
at the control stick, waiting for us…
With the tragic loss of her husband, in “How to Forget,” Gomez finds and creates an unforgettable image daring hope to suffice,
All your goodbyes have turned into horses.
They are grazing peacefully. Your words
are blades of grass, our last argument
a pasture dotted with poppies.
Gomez’s poems gallop the full range from stanzas of quiet reflection, unveiled despair, to the dark comedy of living among inconsolable objects we create, in “The Game” with her three-year-old son,
I love you the whole driveway
and parking lot. I love you every pothole in New York City. I love you
more than abcdefg. I love you more than purple, more than gold.
I love you more than cat vomit and dog poop. I love you all the dead people
in the cemetary. I love you eyeballs and bones and rotting skin, and…and…
he’s looking around wildly for the right thing to say, his eyes scanning
the floor, the ceiling, the shelve, and then… I love you so much
I hate you.
In the last section, a restlessness sings, “To the Jewish Girl Praising Jesus in the Gospel Choir After Her Parent’s Divorce,” couplets resounding, raising her voice for “George the Snail, Believed to Be the Last of His Species, Dies in Hawaii,” and shouting the “Ode to the Non-Conformist”,
out of this infinitesimal insurgent. So they place its bad-ass
onto a giant track and make it run
through a superconducting circus act
at minus 450 degrees to study its peculiar wobble.
O puny humans. They are no match
I cheer for the muon.
And in case you had not yet considered the company of inconsolable objects, Gomez invites you to read “An Inventory of Inconsolable Objects”
1.The disarticulated skeleton of a barn owl. 2. A bowl of doorknobs.
3. Seven antique mirrors, black spidery clouds drifting across
their de-silvered backs. 4. An old violin, body charred and brloken,
seams split, pegbox cracked in half. 5. Dismantled clocks, moon dials
and click springs, hand and faces endlessly counting…
Never shying from the complexity of the world, Gomez is a storm, a tornado, but also the silence that comes before and after the tornado. What results are poems that hold us tightly in reflection, yet tantalize and explode all at the same time, leaving us in a place where naivete, anger, joy and personal power collide showing us what it feels like to allow a human to be human.
But she shows us what devastating resiliency sounds like in “Still,”
How do we keep on?
The bird drops its song, over and over,
picking it up and dropping it,
little notes spilling down the mountain.
Gomez brings an unvarnished honesty that brings us closer to our innerness, it is difficult not to respond affirmative to an invitation from “Nancyland: A Visitor’s Guide”,
Teach yourself the language of stones
and oceans. Open the windows
of your bones so the requiem
the trees sing when they sway
can enter. When the wind grows still,
and the hills begin to shiver, notice how
colors turn otherworldly before they fade
into the dusk they came from.
Hold the silence in your mind until it turns
into words.
For this we are grateful to Gomez, she has turned the silences in her mind into these words, that relinquish control but in the breaking process, somehow plucks out a chord that consoles us.
Nancy Gomez Miller is the author of Inconsolable Objects and the chapbook Punishment (Rattle chapbook series). She has worked as a waitress, a stablehand, an attorney, and a television producer. She co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salina Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails and the Juvenile Hall. She has a B.A. and J.D. from the University of California, San Diego, and an MFA from Pacific University.
Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez
YesYes Books, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-936919-97-0
Pages of book: 104
Jeanne Yu is an emerging poet, life-long environmentalist, an engineer and a mom who completed her MFA at Pacific University in January 2023. Jeanne’s work can be found in Rattle, Breakwater Review, Paper Dragon, Bellingham Review, Intima, The Inflectionist Review, New Letters, Otterhouse Arts, and the Oregon Poetry Association. She has enjoyed volunteering for Northwest Review, Perugia Press and CALYX.