Geographic Tongue

There’s a temptation to treat the unexpectedly devastating poems in Gomez’s experimental collection as puzzles to be unlocked. Some appear like maps or mazes, while others resemble PowerPoint presentations or other bits of corporate detritus. Gomez makes it clear there will be no major reveal (a diagram in the last section of the volume is labeled, “you haven’t had any closure”), but the lyricism of the text makes for a collection that goes beyond just questioning meaning-making. The first of five short sections circles around “history written in slaughter/ written on the body of migrants.” Gomez’s lines become the destroyed bodies, and readers mourn them as such. The subject matter of the middle sections winds through less cohesive territory, but wields incisive literary and visual wit, as with a poetic Mad Libs that invites readers to insert one of three words written on wheels: “with,” “word,” or “wound”; and “loved,” “died,” or “flew.” The reader throughout is made both a cocreator of the text and to some degree helpless: Sometimes letters just accumulate in a pile like a mass grave. But sprinkled throughout these jarring visions are oddly reassuring mantras: “Accepting the truth has more grace than any power to end.” Gomez’s poems uplift even as they undercut, and vice versa, which may be why this work—for all its abstraction—feels searingly real. (Oct.)