Brenna Womer

Prose Writer • Poet • Artist • Editor • Professor

Cover Art by Brenna Womer

Dear Mom

“Brenna Womer’s Dear Mom dwells in a liminal dreamscape between erasure and collage, untethering and accumulation, mothers and daughters. These gorgeous images blur, bury, conceal and transmute Womer’s mother’s long-ago letters to her parents, and the result is both a work of powerful abstraction reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler’s canvases and an epistolary cry of generational yearning. Womer’s materials of erasure—tape, nail polish, decorative swatches, ink, bible passages—create a physical analog to the ever-shifting emotional landscape between mother and daughter, its superficialities and its depths. Some images are created through layers of decorative swatches—a literal papering-over—the poem disrupting the pattern like a truth breaking through niceties. In another piece, price tags are unrolled over the original letter as if from a supermarket label gun, and the stark poem beneath feels like a confession and a transaction all at once. Dear Mom, in all its antic beauty, transfigures the bleak exhilaration at the heart of loss.”

Monica McFawn, author of Bright Shards of Someplace Else

“Brenna Womer’s Dear Mom highlights the impossibility and ecstasy of the human journey: the complexities of connection while simultaneously searching for oneself. Using a found correspondence from her mother, Womer recreates a confessional correspondence allowing the reader to witness what feels like an urgent and necessary dialogue, that gives some hard truths the wings they have needed. I’ve never read a chapbook so artfully innovative and starkly intimate. Womer has found the perfect form and redefined exactly what erasure—the spaces and silences—can do.”

Kelly Grace Thomas, author of Boat Burned

“Can a goodbye letter double as a love letter? In this stunning—often, gutting—erasure, Brenna Womer uses her mother’s own letters and military documents to empathize with her mother’s difficult history, honor their relationship, and—finally—to break free. What a beautiful, masterful work.”

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, author of Spectacle

cost of living

“Brenna Womer’s cost of living is meditative, subtle, and moving; it bursts with surprising and dynamic language that circles familial histories, complex intimacies, class, memory, and origin. Deeply intimate and carefully observed, Womer’s writing reveals the expansive possibilities of both poetry and prose.”

K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary

“Budgeting for Sensodyne while finding “no place, yet, to sell a memory,” the narrator in Brenna Womer’s hybrid collection, cost of living, knows both the heavy expense of connection and the ache of paying for one’s place in the world. The weight of expectations press into the grit of love, leaving behind indelible scratches. Womer’s work will leave you similarly marked.”

Kristine Langley Mahler, author of Curing Season

“From gleaning to toothaches, across anxieties and economic precarity, Womer writes with gorgeous attention to language and to sound, creating a book quivering with insights. I loved this book.” 

TaraShea Nesbit, author of Beheld

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Cover art by Skylar Simpson

honeypot

“Brenna Womer’s honeypot gives us familiar literary forms—including pristine prose paragraphs, lyric strophes, and short fictions—only to dismantle them for feminist ends. Frequently engaging questions of language, agency, and the body, Womer’s formal innovations call into question normative assumptions about how narrative should or ought to behave, giving us instead a lyricism that ‘thrives in areas of disruption.’ By moving between moments of wholeness and provocative fragmentation, Womer begins work toward an alternative lexicon, one more hospitable to women’s voices. Here, she proves that a new line of inquiry demands new forms of discourse, ultimately creating—through her deft experimentation with received forms—a vehicle that fully does justice to the complexity of her thinking. This is an astonishing debut.”

Kristina Marie Darling, author of Dark Horse: Poems

“Everything about honeypot—including the title—is sensual, is tactile, is something you can roll over your tongue and under your nose and luxuriate in. Whether poetry, prose, or in-between; whether realism or something floating farther afield, Womer makes it so vivid and vital you can’t help but get caught completely in its web.”

      Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World

“Slipping easily from genre to genre and form to form, proudly saying the supposedly unsayable, refusing ever to balk in the name of imposed politeness or unfair expectation, Brenna Womer breaks all the rules except the most important one: to tell your own truth unswervingly, in the best way you know how, no matter what. This is a smart, brave first collection, brimming with beauty and empathy and joy.”

      Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

“DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE” in Grist (epistolary erasure)

“i do everything twice” in Sugar House Review (visual poem)

“Distress Tolerance Handouts 6A, 9A, & 8A” in Nerve to Write (hybrid erasure)

“My mother tells me” in Mom Egg Review (flash essay)

“5150; or, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” (poem) in The World We See: Women Poets on Neurodivergence (Texas Review Press, 2027)

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