Might Kindred

Description

The poems of Might Kindred wonder aloud: can we belong to one another, and “can a people belong to a dreaming machine?” Conjuring mountains and bodies of water, queer and immigrant poetics, beloveds both human and animal, Mónica Gomery explores the intimately personal and the possibility of a collective voice. Here anthems are sung and fall apart midsong. The speaker exchanges letters with her ancestors, is visited by a shadow sister, and interrogates what it means to make a home as a first-generation American.
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, the poems in Might Kindred are rooted in the body and its cousins, seeking the possibility of kinship, “in case we might kindness, might ardor together.” Belonging and unbelonging are claimed as part of the same complicated whole, and Gomery’s intersections reach for something divine at the center. The poems of Might Kindred wonder: “can a people belong to a dreaming machine?” Conjuring mountains and bodies of water, queer and immigrant poetics, beloveds both human and animal, Mónica Gomery explores the intimately personal and the possibility of a collective voice. Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi living in Philadelphia on unceded Lenni Lenape land. She is the author of the collection Here Is the Night and the Night on the Road and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling. Her poems have appeared in the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day, Waxwing, Adroit Journal, Foglifter, Best Small Fictions 2020, and elsewhere. 
  Self-Portrait with Airplane Turbulence
Theology
Emblanquecer
Immigrant Elegy for Ávila
Family Is an Illumination of Shoulders
Ghazal for a First Lover
Might Kindred
Prologue
When My Sister Visits
Here
God Queers the Mountain
It Isn’t Easy to Speak
Falling Out
A Poem with Two Memories of Venezuela
Letter to Myself from My Great Grandmother
Origin Stories
Abecedario
When My Sister Visits
After Pulse
The Synagogue Membership Assembles to Discuss the Fascist Presidency
Imaginative Exercise in the Study of Epigenetics
Dendrochronology of Hair
Ode to the Poop Bag
The Oldest Form of Prayer
Now We Live Together
Because It Is Elul
When My Sister Visits
We Thanked Her by Digging a Hole
Fragments of an Anthem
Banishing Loneliness
Here
A Poem About a Book About Venezuela
Sleeping in Hurricane Season
Emblanquecer
Ghazal for a Year
Halleluyah
We Walked Dahlias to Her Front Porch
I Thought I Was Done Writing About My Dead
Ghazal for God & Wellbutrin
The Poet Considers If Her Body Belongs to Her
When My Sister Visits
Here
Love Letter
Acknowledgments
Notes