Bøker av Brenna Womer

Brenna Womer's latest cross-genre collection examines what Layli Long Soldier calls "unbrained things." In her poem "Head Count," Long Soldier names hormones, nursing, sleeping, night, and blood. In Womer's collection, she adds shedding, shitting, birthing, fucking, flying, and more to the list.In the titular hybrid essay, "Unbrained," first published by Honey Literary, Womer considers her recent Bipolar diagnosis by a psychiatric nurse with whom she had a single appointment and never saw again. In the closing essay, "Thick Like Me," which won NELLE's Three Sister's Prize for Creative Nonfiction, Womer grapples with a matrilineal legacy of relentless identity-seeking and what of her Mexican heritage she can claim after growing up in whitewashed familial spaces and on U.S. military bases. In her poetry, prose, and hybrid work throughout, Womer interrogates ownership and indulges appetite; she presses through the softness of fur and fat to the hot core of animal innocence. On every page, she asks what's fair but always comes up empty.

From gleaning to toothaches, across anxieties and economic precarity, Womer writes with gorgeous attention to language and to sound, creating a book quivering with insights. I loved this book.-TaraShea Nesbit, author of Beheld Brenna Womer's cost of living is meditative, subtle, and moving; it bursts with surprising and dynamic language that circles familial histories, complex intimacies, class, memory, and origin. Deeply intimate and carefully observed, Womer's writing reveals the expansive possibilities of both poetry and prose.-K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary Budgeting for Sensodyne while finding "no place, yet, to sell a memory," the narrator in Brenna Womer's hybrid collection, cost of living, knows both the heavy expense of connection and the ache of paying for one's place in the world. The weight of expectations press into the grit of love, leaving behind indelible scratches. Womer's work will leave you similarly marked.-Kristine Langley Mahler, author of Curing Season