Inconsolable Objects

In Nancy Miller Gomez’s Inconsolable Objects, the speaker’s life is a composite of objects and occurrences, many of them out of the ordinary, even surreal. “Coachwhip” opens with “the winter the snake went missing”; later:

On the eve of the eighth day
my mother turned on the garbage disposal
and heard the gargle of blades
grinding through bones and flesh.

The poems in this collection have a haunting quality to them. “The Invisible Mother” is inspired by photos from the Victorian era in which mothers are hidden behind a sheet, rendering them “a living field of fabric, / a blank screen. / An erasure.” The poem imagines how one such mother might have felt, present but unseen,

chin quivering like a small bird. She has folded
her sorrows into napkins placed at a table
set for her children. They feast until nothing is left

but her absence.

Gomez delves into that which is often overlooked. “How Are We Doing?” opens with “The man working window eleven / at the DMV,” who “wears a happy face / pinned to his nametag as if he’s hosting / a social event.”

The poems in this collection are full of compassion for the world, both the human and the more than human. But there’s also a mischievous sense of humor. In “Unsolicited” a woman finds a photo of a penis on her phone and proceeds to ask the men around her “Is this yours?” And in “Vengeance” the speaker finds an unconventional way to get back at her cheating husband:

I’d fished a diaper from the dirty bin,
harvested some of the yellow and brown,
kneaded it beneath the collar, massaged some
under the label, carefully toothbrushed
a bit into the seams.

The light, playful tone in these and other poems balances the sad, the ugly, the painful memories, “I love you more than cat vomit and dog poop, I love you all the dead people / in the cemetery. I love you eyeballs and bones and rotting skin, and…and…”