MIGHT KINDRED

Winner of the 2021 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

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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.

 Praise for Might Kindred

Into this collection’s longing arms Gomery gathers all matter of kin and all kin of matter: landscapes, stones, ‘unsiblings,’ creation myths, God, language, home, bodies, soil, dignity, ‘jagged verges,’ mirrors, and eyes. She grapples: What are we to do in a world where loss is certain, time is defiant, and the self aches to transcend its borders? Instead of offering us synthetic answers Gomery’s poems arrive ‘bare skinned on the bridge between thinking / and knowing.’ This book is an invitation, a constellation, a map. We are lucky, lucky victims of its grandeur.

-Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium

If you take a child to the mountain,’ writes Mónica Gomery in Might Kindred, ‘do not expect the mountain to not live inside the child.’ Reader, you and I are the child. This collection is the mountain. Expect nothing less than to be forever changed.

-Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary Beast

The ancestors Gomery addresses in these poems “have planted and tended gardens of blue sage,” and the light is “made plaid with trees,” reaffirming her commitment to establishing a sense of belonging for voices that are marginalized or forgotten. “All of us breathing, all of us threaded by salt,” she writes, paying tribute to “many lives” that are “at stake.”These generous and sensitive meditations on belonging and the first-generation experience cast intimate light on shared human experiences.

-Publishers Weekly

In her second full-length collection of poems, Might Kindred, Mónica Gomery renders the body to its emotional landscapes: family, immigration, home, belonging, love. Gomery listens to the geographic melodies of the heart as she beckons for “a soft plot of soil” to plant these hardships and watch them bloom again with resolve. Might Kindred reminds us that “when it is over the earth will know what to do next” and that all we can do is wait, witness, hope and believe in the magic that remains in the world.”

-Marisa Vito, Brooklyn Poets

What I found in this collection is not only an invitation to belong, but a reassurance that the self has always been unequivocally whole even if we must journey forward and back through time to come to that understanding.

-S.M. Badawi, Waxwing Magazine

Might Kindred is a wonderful book. Nouns become verbs through the sheer muscle of language, through queer poetics. The poet’s dictions are both colloquial and heightened, biblical, sensual, unafraid. I love these poems and what they’re saying.

-Hilda Raz, author of Divine Honors