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WE CALL THEM BEAUTIFUL by KC Trommer

    • WE CALL THEM BEAUTIFUL by KC Trommer

    Distribution
    Full-length collection
    Publication Date: March 27, 2019
    ISBN: 9781939728296 (6.5x9" 84pp, perfectpaperback)

    • Advance Praise

      Rejoice all lovers of the word for the generous, gorgeous, and timely gathering that is KC Trommer's We Call Them Beautiful. The world needs these poems right now for they are fostered alike by Beauty and by Dread and they do what only real poems can: they leave us changed. We come away from reading them somehow feeling like the recipients of a benediction that makes us more merciful, more tender towards the world, towards ourselves.

      —Lorna Goodison, Poet Laureate of Jamaica


      KC Trommer’s brave debut explores the power in doing: seeing, naming. touching, marveling, grieving. Some of the most heart-wrenching poems in We Call Them Beautiful explore divorce—the rage, alienation, and disappointment. As Trommer writes, “Now is a matter of thinking of what tense / I choose to know you in.” As these poems wisely suggest, past, present, and future are all imperfect, but there is a hopeful courage in the voice: “Wherever I go, I am this woman.” This woman—this poet—is a force.
      —Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones


      To be “broken and mended, broken and mended,” the poet, KC Trommer, writes for all of us, as she fearlessly and poetically confronts the corrosion—and tender maternity—of love’s scarred and unfathomable existence.

      —Emily Fragos, author of St. Torch


      Assured and masterful in its compassion, KC Trommer’s poetry is a salvage and positively shimmering balm, always open to the quite miraculous, the delicate negotiations in realms of home, heartbreak, the Cape and city blocks, layers of subways and museum havens. If you are like me, repeating to myself her turns of capture and release, you will find these lines etched long in memory: these poems are a net of light, piece-by-piece bringing up the best in all of us and unmistakably making the day sing.
      —Douglas A. Martin, author of Acker
       
      Among KC Trommer’s poems, one finds emergences, tests of bravery, and dollops of trust. Her poem’s utterances—sometimes turning on display, sometimes mercurially floating in a consuming element . . . sometimes nervous peerage into traps, sometimes celebrations of the security of confederation—are always a suspension of self-possession; hers are songs of the unrepressed and the eternal.
      —Scott Hightower, author of Self-evident

       

    • About the Author

      KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019), as well as the chapbook The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). A graduate of the MFA program at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and her poem “Fear Not, Mary” won the 2015 Fugue Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Blackbird, Octopus, The Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, and in the anthologies Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017) and Who Will Speak for America? (Temple University Press, 2018). She is the curator of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. You can find her at kctrommer.com.

       

    • About the Collection

      We Call Them Beautiful is a vibrant debut, filled with emergencies and responses to them. “This, all this,/is the making of you,” the poet KC Trommer writes, reminding us that what we live through changes us and the stories we tell about our lives. In these poems of love, pleasure, and survival, the poet navigates the cold menace of the Atlantic Ocean, the wild terrors of sex and carnival rides, the bittersweetness of watching her sleeping child’s quiet breathing, all while mapping the power, joy, and dangers of being a woman in the world. Drawing its strength from discovery, We Call Them Beautiful explores the necessary making and remaking of the self, through art and stories, while looking unflinchingly at the ways that time works on us all.

       

    • Further Reading

      Select Poems from We Call Them Beautiful 

       

       

    • Press

      Reviews & Interviews

       

       

       

       

       

      Features

       

       

       

       

      Awards & Honors

       

      • 2020 Eric Hoffer Poetry Category 1st Runner-up

       

      • 2020 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Shortlist Finalist

       

      • 2020 Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award Finalist

       

    $18.00Price
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