Might Kindred

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.

"These generous and sensitive meditations on belonging and the first-generation experience cast intimate light on shared human experiences."-Publishers Weekly “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 “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

• Self-Portrait with Airplane TurbulenceTheologyEmblanquecerImmigrant Elegy for ÁvilaFamily Is an Illumination of ShouldersGhazal for a First LoverMight KindredPrologueWhen My Sister VisitsHereGod Queers the MountainIt Isn’t Easy to SpeakFalling OutA Poem with Two Memories of VenezuelaLetter to Myself from My Great GrandmotherOrigin StoriesAbecedarioWhen My Sister VisitsAfter PulseThe Synagogue Membership Assembles to Discuss the Fascist PresidencyImaginative Exercise in the Study of EpigeneticsDendrochronology of HairOde to the Poop BagThe Oldest Form of PrayerNow We Live TogetherBecause It Is ElulWhen My Sister VisitsWe Thanked Her by Digging a HoleFragments of an AnthemBanishing LonelinessHereA Poem About a Book About VenezuelaSleeping in Hurricane SeasonEmblanquecerGhazal for a YearHalleluyahWe Walked Dahlias to Her Front PorchI Thought I Was Done Writing About My DeadGhazal for God & WellbutrinThe Poet Considers If Her Body Belongs to HerWhen My Sister VisitsHereLove LetterAcknowledgmentsNotes