Might Kindered
Winner of the 2021 Book Prize in Poetry
The winner of the 2021 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry is Mónica Gomery for Might Kindred, chosen by Guest Judges Hilda Raz and Aimee Nezhukumatathil with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. She will receive a $3,000 award and publication by the University of Nebraska Press.
Mónica Gomery is the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books 2017). Her poetry has won the 2020 Minola Review Poetry Contest, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. Her writing can be found most recently at the Poetry Foundation website as a Poem of The Day and is forthcoming in Waxwing, Black Warrior Review, and The Journal. She was raised by her Venezuelan Jewish family in Boston and Caracas, and now lives on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia, where she spends her days in service to her community as a rabbi.
About the Book
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
“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
