Nowhere 

Katie Schmid’s Nowhere interrogates ontologies of kinship. Some poems explore the (often toxic) masculinities in her life: father, brother, boyfriend, boys of the Midwest; others express a longing for women, including a best friend she disavowed on graduation night for her boyfriend (“why / choose stupefaction and men, again?”). In later poems, she writes to the baby “multiplying furiously” inside her, who is forming their body “from the leftovers in the corners of the celestial refrigerators.” Schmid’s poetry is interested in a kind of mise-en-scene of bodies; in order not to fully lose a beloved, she imagines them as captive within her body or enters into them as if they were a habit, as in the poem “Curse”:

I can’t forgive
the men who make me
watch them die
I’m going to crawl inside their bodies
and wear them

“The Island of Lost things,” about a miscarriage, closes: “The nurse sounds the depths of my stomach / as if it were an ocean, // as if the island is hard to find, though I feel it / rise under my skin. In this moment before elation / or disaster, I’ve lived my whole life.” For Schmid, the body is a “broad injustice” ––a grave, a hiding place, an underworld. 

Schmid’s best poems move away from a direct, over-explanatory mode and grow into their musicality and playful morbidity. In “It is summer so my cunt wears me,” the speaker detaches the form of her cunt in order to “abstract it.” Have we read, ever, a philosophical poem about summer cunt-ness and the “thousand men” who tell young women “how the weather system of their cunts / affects the world”? At the end of the poem, the cunt becomes an alien matriarch who mourns a dead cockroach in the bathroom, recognizing the revulsion of the dead insect as not unrelated to the magnetism of its own form. Through magical realism, Schmid transforms the seasonal perils of girlhood, demonstrating compassion for that which both disgusts and enthralls.