Here is the Night and the Night on the Road
Cooper Dillon Books, 2018
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram writes:
In Here is the Night and the Night on the Road she asks “How do you get dressed to go watch someone die?” when “All I can feel is the you-hole, the place where you aren’t.” This is a book witnessing love and loss and love again. The layers multiply into interwoven textures of grief: for the lover’s lost body and the disappearing world that sustains the lovers, a world of “collision, echo of colonization.” The violence of a car crash’s twisted metal is haunted by the violence of forests torn up for roads—both victims of the same hand of man. This matters, Gomery declares, “The land on which we lost you is a colonized terrain, and it is hard to know exactly how that matters, except that it matters in every single way.” In the long tradition of poems about grief, Gomery is a necessary voice. This is an exquisite study in the suddenness of numbered days and the radiant pain of living with love “tumbling forth.”
Manuel Paul López writes:
Mónica Gomery’s Here is the Night and the Night on the Road is a vibrant collection populated with lives “drinking carbon out of the sky.” We confront an environmental logic here where “Each day…[is] swabbed in light.” Gomery’s poetry consists of ache and wail; outrage and grief; love and tenderness, and most abundantly evident, the immense compassion that this poet delivers in a sweeping, resuscitative vision that honors both life and death. Deceptively quiet in its letting go, Gomery’s narratives and soaring lyricism record the murmurs of loss through exquisitely rendered elegies that remind us of “the way living is a small verb for the throbbing we do.” In this current, political moment of existential fear and doubt, this is a collection I will carry with me as an antidote. Gomery’s music “is a yes that washes the world.”
Order Here is the Night and the Night on the Road from Cooper Dillon Books
Of Darkness and Tumbling
YesYes Books, 2017, Limited edition Vinyl 45 chapbook series
Of Darkness and Tumbling chronicles a crash and a coma, a fevered landscape of grief and of waiting. The speaker finds herself caught between "try[ing] to offer some texture/ of faith" and "SCREAMING the suffering earth." This is an unraveling. A song of the body and the fragile bodies it loves. The collection asks: how do we accept calamity when it comes? Gomery builds a resilience of nightmare and dream, dense forest and stammering memory. In the end we are reminded that "The trouble with love is brittle/ and snappable bodies," and yet it is language that carries us through.
Collected Poems, 2022, a limited edition chapbook created by the Kalamazoo Books Arts Center for the Poets In Print series. Featuring linocuts by visual artist Vicki VanAmeyden. See more photos, view a broadside by VanAmeyden and Gomery, and purchase on the KBC website.