By Erin Redfern

In her essay “Voices from the air,” Adrienne Rich notes that a captivating poem is “an instrument for embodied experience.” Inconsolable Objects, Nancy Miller Gomez’s first full-length book, is chock-full of such instruments. The word “body” itself enters in the third line of the collection, and from that point serves as a primary interface between the poems’ various speakers and the vast territory of experience they are navigating.

Nowhere is this function of the body more evident than in “Resurrection,” in which a young girl’s older brother convinces her that she can bring a dead catfish back to life:

                               

            I followed his directions, leaned over the dock,

pressed my lips against the stiff ridge of its mouth

            (while keeping its bloated body submerged

                              

beneath the oily sheen) and began to breathe in

            and out as I opened and closed the bony folds

of its gills. At first, my brother held my ankles, to steady me

            so I wouldn’t fall off the dock. I kept breathing

                              

in through my nose—sting of creosote and pond rot—

            and out through my mouth—a soft exhale of prayer.

                              

The description, with its exact imagery, reinforcing sound (the percussive consonants that purse the lips, the variety of breathy o’s), and quick entrechat into metaphor, is characteristic of Miller Gomez’s lines at their best. It also illustrates the book’s dominant motif of those body parts most engaged in language-making:  the mouth, tongue, and lips. 

Besides functioning as a sensory portal to experience, bodies in this collection occupy a liminal space between “object” and “human” (as do animals, in their many uncanny appearances). Under the right conditions, bodies can qualify as “inconsolable,” that is, as being utterly helpless and unreachable in face of irreparable loss or damage. A good example of a straight up “inconsolable object” is “the double-wide” in “Talking to the Tornado,” with its “metal shriek,” 

                              

tumbling down the street, dragging

its own clothesline still flying

one white nightie 

in surrender.

                              

Any time a body fails to signify a person’s humanity, its agency is similarly threatened. In “Snapshot” when a young girl is told by “[t]he man with the camera,” “you can do better. / Give me a smile,” her body becomes “a wound” wrapped in a dress.

                              

My arms were cinched in tourniquets

of tulle, my throat choked in a rage

                              

of lace. I’d hacked my hair to chaos.

Kept it ragged and short. Kept my fists

                              

clenched in the fuselage of my lap. My eyes—

two foxhole. No light escaped. My lips

                              

stretched across my face like a trip wire. 

                              

In “Tilt-a-Whirl,” a speaker comes into awareness of the sexual objectification of women when a predatory ride operator traps her and her sister on “those dizzying red teaups,”

                              

                                                . . . the man

at the control stick, waiting for us

                              

to spin toward him again, and each time he cocked his hand

            as if sighting prey down the barrel of a gun.

                              

Because of their socially marked characteristics, bodies thus limit the perceived humanity of other people. But because we all exist in one, bodies also connect us to one another, and us as readers to the spectrum of characters across the collection. “We are all broken,” Miller Gomez has said, and these poems carry a wild sympathy, and often an inclusive humor, for seemingly unsympathetic bodies—the fair ride conductor, the DMV worker, the monk-eating leopard, the dick pic sender, the men in C-block in the county jail, even the speaker’s drunk younger self, that “poor fucked up thing,” in “Past Life.” 

Bodies-as-objects may not be consolable, but bodies-as-humans potentially are. In the logic of this collection, adding the spell of language to the evidence of the senses is what enables us to find a way to live through their brokenness. Specifically, language opens up a space capacious enough to hold the complexities of lived human experience. “Childhood Insomnia,” the ars poetica at the heart of this collection, best illustrates this essential breathing, coming-into-being room. In the opening lines, the speaker’s young self is highly sensitive to her five senses and dark imagination, but utterly without anchor:  

                              

I was the child terrified of time.

If I sat still, it ticked, and I hated the sound

of everything elapsing. During the day

I kept myself moving. At night, stupid with fear,

I’d lie in my bed and count,

                              

            staring into the darkness worried

what the hours would do 

if I wasn’t awake to witness them. 

The stakes were unbearable—

everyone I loved would grow old

and die. Each night I’d fight

            to keep from falling

                        off the unsteady ledge of consciousness.

                              

                                    . . .And every time

            I tripped into the abyss

I’d come back gasping

from all that nothingness.

                        How hard it was to climb out

of silence, and later, 

                        the gut-punch

            of waking up

knowing I’d lost those hours forever. 

Then comes the consolation of words, the order and music of patterned sound:

But I found out how to make time

mine. I spoke in unfinished sentences,

            repeated words in my head:

flabbergast, mollycoddle, kick the stick.

                              

Words turn objects in the outer world into talismans for navigating the inner one, as well as giving the speaker a way to move intact and fluidly between them.

                              

            I carried rocks in my pockets:

            polished pebbles and ice stones,

my fingers memorizing their contours

and curves while I studied how to navigate

the day-lit world . . .

                              

. . .I taught myself to slip

in and out 

of dreams, learned to open

            one second and savor

                        the mysterious

kernels galloping on my tongue,

                                    the talismanic syllables 

sliding into the world. 

                              

This sounds an awful lot like teaching oneself to recite, or create, poems. Though no cure-all (“sometimes the unsleeping child comes back,” the speaker admits), the “momentary stay against confusion” offered is powerful enough, in “Still,” the collection’s final poem, to hold the passing of time and the world in all its materiality, humanity, beauty, and mystery: 

                              

The last apple hangs on into winter. 

Drops of rain-sweat slide down its mottled skin, 

catch light from the sun and turn gold. 

Shriveled and brown as a shrunken head, 

it holds onto the branch even while falling

further into itself.

                              

Isn’t persistence beautiful?

                              

The woman who shows up daily

for her dose of methadone.

The man punching the clock shift after shift

though he carries his heart through each day 

in a cold, empty chest. The small boy 

who tries to make sense of the lines 

his teacher has made on the chalkboard.

How do we keep on? 

                              

The bird drops its song, over and over, 

picking it up and dropping it, 

little notes spilling down the mountain.

                              

My father on his deathbed, eyes still filled 

with wonder, he lingers longer and longer

in the spaces between each breath, 

stepping carefully onto the ledge 

of his last thought.

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Erin Redfern’s work has recently appeared in The Shore, Rattle, The Hopkins Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She earned her PhD at Northwestern University, where she was a Fellow at the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence. A San Jose native and resident, she has served as poetry judge for the San Francisco Unified School District’s Arts Festival and as a reader for Poetry Center San Jose’s Caesura and DMQ Review. Her website is erinredfern.org.