Might Kindred

In this verdant and lushly sorrowful debut, Gomery bears witness to migration, grief, family, queerness, and love. The opening poem, “Self-Portrait with Airplane Turbulence,” makes a claim for the collection’s interest in self-definition and its descriptive power: “I don’t know what I am, but I am not/ one incarnation. 7 miles over the city/ the plane bucks between tar-coated angels// and night’s groaning light bulbs.” These poems come alive in a “great field of language,” with Gomery inventing new verbs (“Tendergentled, gendercracked”) to approach her subjects. 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. (Nov.)