In Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books, 2024), the debut poetry collection by Nancy Miller Gomez, the poems marvel at the mysteries of life and search for meaning in a county jail, a DMV, a carnival, a war-torn road, a parking lot outside of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, a home facing an oncoming tornado, and on. Each poem offers a vivid portrait of someone or something in a state of brokenness, without sentimentality, illuminating unexpected connections of our shared humanity. By witnessing moments of survival through the lens of “a hand grenade of a girl,” Inconsolable Objects fearlessly probes the complexities of what it takes to hold on.
Nancy Miller Gomez, who received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology, is the author of the chapbook Punishment and is a co-founder of the Santa Cruz Poetry Project, a program that provides creative writing classes to incarcerated people in the Santa Cruz County jail system.
I spoke with Gomez through email and Zoom, where we discussed this exquisitely unusual book, its surprising imagery, the transformative power of writing workshops, and how persistence can be a thing of beauty.
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The Rumpus: I love the compassion emanating from your poetry. In each piece, we are presented with objects, places, animals, and people struggling. Every detail is treated with such care, and the connections created in each poem never fail to surprise. How would you describe your approach to your work?
Nancy Miller Gomez: When I gave myself permission to become a poet, I noticed that I began to experience the world differently. I started to really pay attention. Before, I’d had all these filters up, just to get through my days, and when I took them down, the world came pouring in with all its pain and beauty and mystery. There’s always so much happening around us—we can’t possibly take it all in—but certain things seem to be a beacon for my attention. When one of those things stays with me, or a memory surfaces, I know there must be a reason my mind has held onto it. I keep a record of these recollections in hand-scrawled notes or computer files. When I sit down to write I dip into that stash of material. It’s my secret treasure trove that I can explore in search of a poem. If I’m lucky and the poetry gods are shining, I might surprise myself by discovering some truth about myself or human nature or some aspect of the curious, unknowable world.
Rumpus: Did the poems in Inconsolable Objects begin as standalone pieces? At what point did you know they would become a book?
Gomez: I wasn’t writing with an eye toward creating a collection, but you can see my obsessions running through the individual poems and I think that gives the manuscript cohesiveness. There are themes that replay throughout. Although when I began to wrangle poems together, some of them behaved badly. They refused to play nice with other poems in the collection, so then I had to make choices and the content of the book changed over time. It was like a bus tour to some unknown destination, with poems getting on and off at various stops: Some poems stayed on for the entire ride. Some slept past their exits. Some had to be escorted off kicking and screaming.
Rumpus: The poem “Kansas” is a gorgeous love letter full of longing for a place and time remembered: “I’m lonely for the rows of tract homes/ that cropped up like winter wheat. / For basements smelling of damp cement / and secrets. Leaf piles and bonfires, / the air throbbing with the metallic whine / and clicks of cicadas and katydids.” How did Sharon Olds help you revise a line that appears later in this poem?
Gomez: I’m not someone who can cough out a poem on demand. Generative workshops where I’m given a prompt and told to go off and write a poem rarely yield anything more than inelegant navel-gazing on my part. That said, I still think any time spent trying to write is valuable. Mostly I come up with nothing but sometimes I strike a vein.
In a generative workshop co-led by Sharon Olds and Naomi Shihab Nye—how great is that!—Sharon suggested we write about a place. I drove out to California in my Karmann Ghia when I was seventeen, but I’ve always carried the Kansas I grew up in around with me. It manifests as a kind of chronic longing for a home I can never go back to, so the prompt was extremely fruitful. The images poured out of me onto the page as if they’d been lined up just waiting for permission.
One of my favorite memories is of those summer nights, when my father would turn on the giant attic fan. It sucked air through the entire house and everything hummed with a warm, comforting wind. It felt like being inside a living, breathing creature. I’d grappled with trying to describe the feeling and landed on the lines: “. . . the ancient attic fan / that filled our house with a hot wind / and a roaring hum / as if each night we’d bedded down / in the purring throat of God.”
On the last night of the workshop, we were asked to read one piece. After I bravely shared my wobbly first draft, Sharon Olds asked, “Did you say ‘the purling throat of God?’” Of course, when Sharon Olds is smiling and nodding her head and appears to be paying you a compliment, you just stand there awestruck and nod your head back, which is what I did. And then, of course, I immediately changed the word purring to purling, because, thank you Sharon, that is so unexpected—and so much better!
Rumpus: You co-founded the Santa Cruz Poetry Project, which provides creative writing classes to people who are incarcerated in the Santa Cruz area. Would you tell us more about this program and how it came to be?
Gomez: As her Poet Laureate project, Ellen Bass wanted to bring poetry to incarcerated people of Santa Cruz and asked me to help launch the Poetry in the Jails program. Now in its tenth year, we currently have up to six weekly workshops in the jails and one at the library where formerly incarcerated poets can continue their writing practice in community with other writers. Poetry heals by helping people put their experiences into words that can be reflected on and shared, and that sharing helps them feel seen and heard and understood. That’s something women and men in the carceral system desperately need. I’ve taught lots of workshops in jails and prisons and the healing and humanity that happens in those workshops is magic.
Rumpus: The poem “Growing Apples in the County Jail” is about a seedling of an apple tree that begins to grow in a plastic cup inside the jail. We see incarcerated people nurturing a struggling plant and hoping that it will thrive against all odds. Was identifying hope a conscious part of your writing process or did you find these perches to be natural extensions of the material you were already exploring?
Gomez: I don’t know what happened with the little apple tree. That it germinated at all was, I suppose, miraculous, and gave everyone in that room a glimpse of the holy. Sometimes that’s all we need to get through our days. I don’t think identifying hope is part of my conscious process when I’m writing, but I do think it’s how I move through the world, especially in difficult times. I’m always looking for my next handhold of hopefulness to grab onto and if my poems help another person grab onto hope as well–that is the best use of poetry I can imagine.
Rumpus: Your chapbook, Punishment, is a collection of poetry and essays about your experience in leading creative writing workshops in jails and prisons and demonstrates the redemptive power of poetry. It also illuminates aspects of incarceration that are often under-examined. How has your experience informed your work?
Gomez: I struggle with debilitating self-doubt. Working with incarcerated writers who show up to a writing workshop despite the hardships and obstacles they face every day helps to keep my inner critic in check. It’s hard to whine about not getting published or winning a contest when I know I’ll get to walk out and drive home. Their courage inspires me to say to myself, “Oh, just get over yourself and write.” Getting published isn’t the end game. Poetry, at its best, is soul-work. We’re human. We make mistakes. We just want to be heard and understood and loved. Poetry can help us do that, and ultimately, that’s what matters.
Rumpus: While Punishment, is a collection of both poems and essays, Inconsolable Objects is a poetry collection that reveals powerful narratives and asks thought-provoking questions. Complicated emotions are grounded in stunning detail and form unexpected connections. How do you decide whether a piece will take on the form of a poem or an essay?
Gomez: Sometimes what begins as a poem gathers momentum and extends beyond line-breaks and poetic concision, and I realize I’m writing prose. Sometimes I begin writing what I think is prose but realize it should be a poem, and I recraft it accordingly. I came to the study of poetry to make myself a better prose writer. It’s like lifting weights in the gym so you can play better tennis. Many of my favorite writers began as poets, and what I love and admire about their prose is that you can hear the poetry in every sentence. I’m a sucker for a story, though, in prose or poetry. I have my obsessions—the stories I keep writing because I’m trying to work out the answer to some big, enigmatic question.
Sometimes poetry feels like it’s the best form to grapple with the mysteries and sometimes prose feels like it will get me closer. So I give myself permission to be fluid, to move back and forth between the two genres. I think creative nonfiction, especially the lyric essay, is so closely related to poetry that the two forms can become indistinguishable. Although both should be true, essays have the additional obligation of staying factual. If the facts are keeping me from getting closer to some truth, then I might choose to approach it in a poem where I don’t have to stage-manage the facts.
Rumpus: Your appreciation for metaphor is found throughout this book, and some of the unusual imagery and examples are identified in nature. In the poem “Self Portrait as Sea Slug,” the speaker takes on a sea slug’s ability to self-decapitate and regenerate itself. In the Notes section, you mention this poem was based on a study led by author Sayaka Mitoh of Nara Women’s University in Japan. Can you tell us more about where you find inspiration and how this influences your reading and research habits?
Gomez: I think poetry can be found everywhere, if you’re paying attention: in line at the DMV, at the Walmart, in the waiting room at the jail. I’m also a habitual reader. One of my biggest fears in life is that I will be stuck somewhere without something to read. That would be my No Exit version of hell. Many of my poems begin with an epigraph from the news because I find newspapers and social media brimming with ideas to write about. The world is strange and weird and wonderful, and yes, sometimes awful, and the media is filled with these strange, wonderful, awful things just waiting to become poems.
Rumpus: “The Thief” contemplates the choice of the person who took the notebook of poetry, instead of the birding binoculars or a Swiss Army Knife from your car. “How Are We Doing?” wonders about the inner emotional life of a clerk at the DMV when he’s being treated horribly.
Would you tell us more about what draws you to explore the mysteries of other people’s innerworkings?
Gomez: Every poem I write is just me feeling my way along a metaphorical ledge looking for the secret latch, so I can open the window and let the answer to the mystery out. I haven’t found the latch yet, but as long as I’m still writing, I’m still looking.
Rumpus: “Missing History” is a powerful poem about searching for the missing women’s stories throughout recorded history. This line from your poem really stuck with me: “Sometimes I feel my grandmother, / a canary, stilled in my throat. / A smolder of story / I’m trying to revive.” How has your grandmother’s writing influenced your work?
Gomez: I didn’t meet my grandmother until I was eighteen. She’d left my infant mother with relatives in Tennessee and moved to a small coastal town in Southern California, where she lived in a beach shack and wrote poetry. This was in the 1930s when unmarried women could not raise children out of wedlock and were not allowed to live a bohemian lifestyle without consequences. And there were consequences. My grandmother spent her life writing. She collected her poems into a manuscript she described as her life’s work, her opus. When she died, the manuscript—along with all her writing—went missing. I have many regrets, but not being able to find my grandmother’s missing manuscript is a loss that manifests itself physically, like there is a small dying bird trapped in my throat. And while I mourn the loss of her poems, I also grieve for all the lost stories and all the years women have been brutally silenced throughout history and, in too many cases, still are.
Rumpus: “Still” is a poem in which the speaker asks, “Isn’t persistence beautiful?” The piece traverses a broad range of moments, where we see how each incremental experience holds significance. The speaker vividly renders the universality and beauty of survival. How would you describe your process of creating this piece?
Gomez: That poem began with an image. The deer eat every apple on our trees that they can reach—they stand on their hind legs!—and we pick the rest. Despite being wormy and bug-kissed, they are delicious. One year, there was an apple way at the top that didn’t get picked. Over time, it shriveled and caved in on itself, but still it clung onto the tree. As it did, it became a glowing thing of beauty, especially in the warm light of the golden hour. Around that same time, my father was dying. Later my poet brain conflated the two memories: my father holding on to life and that apple holding on to the tree. There is so much pain and suffering in the world. Humans are unspeakably cruel to one another, and yet, there is also compassion and kindness. And so, we persevere through our days. “Still” is my attempt to celebrate persistence as a thing of beauty despite all the hardship and heartache and loss. Because there always comes a time when the tree and the apple have to let go of each other.
Rumpus: What are you working on next?
Gomez: I’m always working on six dozen things. I jump back and forth as compelled by time and interest. It’s like moving multiple pieces around a game board. One project that I’m nearly ready to send out into the world is a collection of linked personal essays called “Self-deception for Survival: A Handbook.” It’s about persevering in a world that isn’t kind or easy or honest. I’m also kicking around a new poetry collection called “The Story Animal,” two literary novels and a literary fantasy fiction novel—my secret guilty pleasure. I’m delighted to have the poetry collection published first though because I think poets are the fighter-pilots of the writing world, and I’m honored to be included in their ranks.
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Author photograph courtesy of Nancy Miller Gomez
