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Distributed for Tupelo Press

Mother of Mother of

Poems

Emerging from Mónica Gomery’s experiences as a queer female rabbi, the poems in this collection explore mothering through an ecological, political, and theological lens. 

“How should one love the world?” Mother of Mother of is a trowel, a shovel, or spade, turning the soil of this question again and again. At the crossroads of ecological precarity, political upheaval, and the possibility of motherhood, these poems imagine mothering not as a fixed identity but as an expansive practice of creation, stewardship, and devotion. The speaker mothers texts and prayers; mothers garden beds, houseplants, and loam; mothers and is mothered by the sustaining work of community care. Written on the porous border between poetry and faith, and drawing deeply from the author’s rabbinic practice, Gomery’s incantatory, soulful third collection recasts scriptural matriarchs and archetypes in new light while honoring queer love as sacred inheritance. “Every year I fight a little harder," the speaker confesses. "Every year the singing wins the war." Here, uncertainty blooms into a spiritual home: a fertile unknowing, a place from which to thrive and tend to the world.


90 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2027

Poetry


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Reviews

"’Way too late / for elegies about the earth,’ this poet tells us, ‘to late for compost, eco-poem’--our world is on fire. One of the ancient functions of poetry is to heal and repair the world, despite all the devastation--and this need for repair of our moment is everywhere in these poems’ imagery and tone. Despite all the tragedy we see around us, the poems speak of ’a friend / [who] cooks Condolence Lasagna. / A neighbor neighbors / her elder. Each day, the world asks / to be born.’ This is a book to live with."

Ilya Kaminsky, author of "Deaf Republic"

“Gomery’s poetry is a full-blown practice of praise: her voice is always in relation to others, in community, and in love. In Mother Of Mother Of she sharpens my faith. The poet treats her own body as the instrument of difficult hope, combining feminist Jewish tradition and the hard work of loving truly and queerly in a dying world. In these lyrics one finds an unceasing capacity for song, but it is married to the rabbinic mode: wrestling with questions in the never-ending search for truth. With ‘faith fireworking / through me,’ the poet carries each poem toward rapture and unknowing. Gomery holds it all in her hands: the simultaneous desires for a life with and without children; the clear-eyed contentions with power, violence, and erasure as also parts of Jewish inheritance; the aching tenderness and the dogged turning of the voice, over and over again, toward joy. These poems are heartwork—anthemic, substantial, rigorous, continually in touch with loving. ‘Every year I fight a little harder. / Every year the singing wins the war.’”

Jay Deshpande, author of "Love the Stranger"

“Gomery is a writer obsessed with creation, and in her newest collection Mother of Mother of, she skillfully plumbs the many incarnations of birth and nurture and mutual care. Not least of these is her description of a kind of holy place—a ‘golden lung / unburdened by disaster’—that these poems manifest through their insistent belief in the ‘liquid / goodness at the center of the world.’ If, as Gomery posits, ‘[m]etaphor is a poetics of interconnection,’ then we as readers are beholden to these words that multiply across the page, that bind us together with their fervent, fluent call. ‘Could it be as wild as trusting / other people?’ Reading these poems makes me believe that we can.”

Keetje Kuipers, Editor, Poetry Northwest

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