OMBLIGO / INTAGLIO

ISBN 9781938900273
Publication date: March 2019
73 pages, 5.3″ x 7″
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EXCERPT

A b-side to a one-sided story; in 1961 my mother was three and not thinking of me

— and why should she;

My mother has something to say, now, to me: come home to me;

This call is a bruise; a bruise paling; paling like ice or sand, minerals, petrified wood–the bruise is the expression of delay–understood when the grip stops gripping;

First the pale fingerprint, then blue–does it speak to you? It speaks to me; My mother says come home but what she means is how long will this go on; how long before telling her my regret over the phone becomes static; how long can a person stand static before it becomes song; what tech will “ferret out ‘signals’ buried in ‘noise’”; and when, and who?

PRAISE

Vör Götte’s semi-burial poems are profuse and female and hyperhypnotic and hydra-reverberate effusively with all embalmed dead heretics or “dissonant bells” and are not designed to be pinned down by an “urge to inhabit.” Through Ombligo/Intaglio’s un – extravagant and uncanny fervor, Götte takes us through a deciduous journey into the anthropological “benthic beatitude” of her writing narrative, a meta-language accretion that urges insatiable appetites for everything even things such as “chemical satin that lines a casket” and self-turned-fiction. As a pilgrim of her work, she expects us not to be fragile nor frayed and when we do self-abnegate, to consider her words as high priestesses, “preparing for mass,” a patriarchal mass for those weaponized by love, for sanctuary lamps, tears, rainwater, or for those who are in dire needs of grieving or burial. Even enclaved by Götte’s poetic splendor, we view her work as a “brutal arrhythmic montage”, dare to slice us into two and even “rob the substance” of us, us readers, to bestow us our freedom. Freedom from negative space. Freedom from opposites. Freedom from figments. From “matter, amber, memory.” And, even bellybutton.

– Vi Khi Nao

AUTHOR

Vör Götte is a stage name of Megan Jeanne Gette, who authored chapbooks Poor Banished Child of Eve (H_NGM_N, 2016) and The Walls They Left Us (Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, Newfound, 2016).

DESIGNER

Book design by Betsy Medvedovsky.

ARTIST

Cover art by Nicole Simpkins.