Cover Art: Jess Benjamin
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fisher
Paperback, 40 pages
October 25, 2017, ISBN 978-1-936919-17-8
Of Darkness and Tumbling by Mónica Gomery is part of our limited edition Vinyl 45 chapbook series each title of which frequently sells out within the first months of publication. Get one while you can!
About Mónica Gomery
Born in Massachusetts and raised by her Venezuelan Eastern European family both in Boston and Caracas, Mónica Gomery is a lover of questions, community, language and song. She received rabbinic ordination from Hebrew College in 2017, and currently builds queer Jewish community as the Associate Director of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. Mónica’s writing has appeared in Cutbank, Hold, fog machine, Word For/Word, Requited Journal, and Alice Blue Review, as well as other publications. Of Darkness and Tumbling was a finalist for the 2016 Vinyl 45s Chapbook Contest, and her first full-length book of poetry will be released by Cooper Dillon Press in 2017.
Of Darkness and Tumbling by Mónica Gomery
from Of Darkness and Tumbling
Tonight everything rolls, nothing chips or shatters, nothing is asking for your alertness or for your hand on your heart or your hands on the wheel or your brother’s hands. In the room rotating against the dark night I kissed the hairs between your knuckles and tried to imagine your hips under the gown. I was tired as soon as I walked into the room and I was tired still when I left.
The trouble with memory is the tumbling forth.
About Of Darkness and Tumbling
Of Darkness and Tumbling chronicles a crash and a coma, a fevered landscape of grief and of waiting. The speaker finds herself caught between "try[ing] to offer some texture/ of faith" and "SCREAMING the suffering earth." This is an unraveling. A song of the body and the fragile bodies it loves. The collection asks: how do we accept calamity when it comes? Gomery builds a resilience of nightmare and dream, dense forest and stammering memory. In the end we are reminded that "The trouble with love is brittle/ and snappable bodies," and yet it is language that carries us through.
