Gentlewomen
2020, Noemi Press
ISBN 978-1934819913 / Paperback /81 Pages
$18
Purchase: Noemi Press / Book Shop/ Amazon
Praise and Reviews
Once upon a time, the thinkers and writers (all men) figured nature, providence, and fortune as human and, more specifically, as women. Megan Kaminski’s new work imagines the three still living and working among us today—sisters to one another other, and perhaps to herself. In her formally evocative, gorgeously baroque poems, these gentlewomen are bountiful, powerful, and tender, both exceeding man’s hubris and moored in the wreck it has wrought. —Evie Shockley
Three sisters, three narrative strands, three chords, each pushing out hidden lights, weave together into a cloth that suddenly appears in this world as a book. But then the cloth that is a book becomes a Mystery School. And within the heart of its structure: a plurality of intensities that animate the longing that loss creates. Gentlewomen is an alchemical, gorgeously written movement. —Selah Saterstrom
The next male politician who praises a habitat, species, or human community for its “resilience” will get a copy of Megan Kaminski’s Gentlewomen in the mail from me. Written from deep inside the unsung individual and collective labor it takes to survive ecocidal injustices wrought by patriarchal capitalism, this book documents how it feels “To be broken into so many pieces the only option to piece something new.” This book reminds us we only survive intertwined with our more-than-human communities: “The porous body of we and I and they.” Immersed in sustaining networks of affiliation, strained by our complicity with toxic industries, this book preaches embodiment as ethics, poetics as resistance to poisons, our porousness the polis we always already are. This book’s a lesson in listening to our “collective echo” heard in the earth, our biggest sister. —Brian Teare
This poetry raises its prayer voice for cold mercy, and the land receives its dead. At the same time, a cross-species, pan-material aliveness marks Kaminski’s post-capitalistic layered jubilation, when “Instructions (how to hold the world)” tell us “To filter through flesh, through soil, through layers of lung and/bedrock. To siphon off downstream off diesel tank off currency flow.” Grounded in careful environmental observation, Kaminski crafts riveting spectacles of alchemical survival, where power lines and brush fires, fly buzz and oak blight. become lyric agents in a shifting world. —Orion Magazine
In Gentlewomen, Kaminski suggests a collective landscape and how we, the earth and all her inhabitants, are an extension of each other. This book is a catalyst for community, engulfing the reader with intensity, grace, rage and humor all at once. The sisters want to tell you about survival and about healing. They want to illuminate our possibilities. —Periodicities: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics
Kaminski’s poetic speakers take aim at patriarchal and humanistic hubris, the aggregating centuries during which men have bent both heaven and earth to their methods… Kaminski astutely shifts registers and formal structures in the book to give voice to often unseen or unheard ecologies, and the poems continually explore the sonic and somatic boundaries of the page.” —The Millions
American poet Megan Kaminski’s stunning new book Gentlewomen (Noemi Press, 2020) poeticises an imagined yet familiar world, transforming our orientations to nature, to cultural history and to the lyrical site of the self. There are many voices in this book of poetry: a cold lake promises to ‘devour with satin tongue’, a sister puts her ear to the ground and ‘listens for the softening of earth’ and snow cover asks to stay a little longer in order to melt ‘white iridescent in blue hours’. But housed within a poetics of care, compassion and connection to the natural world, there are devastations, exposing anthropogenic and commodified views of land. The scarring traces of humanity’s outputs permeate the breadth of this luminous collection as poisoned water flows downstream, wet-lands are drained for subdivision, and hands reach ‘across quarantine zones’. —Cordite Poetry Review
Through Gentlewomen, Kaminski writes the difficulties of the world even as she writes to push against them, from the disappeared and damaged, both in human capacity and nature, into something that can be salvaged and defended, if one simply pays attention as to how. —Rob McLennan
INKY Reading Series, May 2021 (video)
Fall Noemi Press Reading & Book Release (video)
It all started when…
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