Coming soon from Diode Editions, We Call Them Beautiful, a full-length debut collection by KC Trommer, winner of the Diode Editions 2018 Book Contest.
KC TROMMER is the author of We Call Them Beautiful, which is forthcoming from Diode Editions in 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, KC has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. 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.
Advance Praise for We Call Them Beautiful
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
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
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
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
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
We Call Them Beautiful is forthcoming in March 2019. Until then, read KC's latest piece in VIDA Review, "Report from the Field: Seeing Is Changing" and learn about her project QUEENSBOUND—a collaborative audio project curated by KC Trommer and supported by a New Work grant from the Queens Council on the Arts. Follow her website www.kctrommer.com for events, projects, poetry and art.
Select Poems
