A sliver of Einstein’s brain blown up under the microscope shows
all the branches
of where his thoughts went. Still waving.
Around the track the trees wave through the grey afternoon sky,
like mute women trying to alert me to an emergency.
Read "We Call Them Beautiful" from KC Trommer's first collection We Call Them Beautiful on Poetry Daily, featured July 2, 2019.
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.
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.
