Visual Poetry Special Feature: “26 Sept 86” by Brenna Womer

Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman:

The best visual poetry conveys complexity by making choices about what text to erase, what medium to use to erase it, and what story or emotion to tell in what remains. Brenna Womer’s forthcoming e-chapbook, Dear Mom, does all three skillfully and is fraught with emotion in complicated ways, a daughter looking at her mother’s words and repurposing them to talk to her in a way that she cannot in person. We’re glad to share one of the pieces from the sequence, “26 Sept 86,” with our readers. (Full disclosure: I wrote a blurb for the book.)

Artist’s Note:

The project from which this piece is excerpted, Dear Mom, is an epistolary erasure project of letters written by my mother from her late teens to mid-twenties, during which time she was first married at eighteen, joined the military at nineteen, was stationed in the Philippines and South Korea, divorced her first husband, grappled with her faith, met and married my father, and gave birth to me.

Through the erasure of her often confessional correspondence to her own parents, I render visible some truths that are difficult for me to speak to my mother, with whom I have a fraught and complicated relationship and am currently no-contact. This piece, like all in the collection and including the cover, were hand-collaged and then scanned by me. Dear Mom is forthcoming from petrichor as part of their e-chapbook series.

26 Sept 86

Brenna Womer (she/they) is a queer, childfree, Latine prose writer, poet, and professor. She’s the author of Unbrained (FlowerSong Press, 2023) and Honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019). Her writing has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA program at California State University, Fresno.