mistaken for loud comets by lily someson

Featuring an introduction by Tony Trigilio

mistaken for loud comets is a collection of poems that intertwines experiences around incarceration, queerness, and the Black body in America. In this chapbook, lily someson leads us through the Indiana dunes, into dusk air as incarcerated men are beamed into the heavens, and into the rooms of a house she built around herself, creating “a world without confinement.” someson’s poetic genius can be felt in her fortitude—she embraces the storm with startling empathy, and within these poems, offers up her most vulnerable moments alongside her most resolute proclamations of selfhood, claiming space on the page as if fighting for her birthright. Exploring the outermost limits of identity with a gentle, inquiring mind, someson lets the poems in mistaken for loud comets be “everything/ all at once.”

excerpt from mistaken for loud comets

          from the poem “lisa, I saw so many geese coming out of a dark grey cloud” 

          ...you call and ask for my mother 
          but i can’t admit that i, too, have come out of something 

          grey and cumulus, a thing 
          who cannot love you correctly. your voice, paternal 

          and otherwise, asks me to write more letters, but i am 
          suddenly her, just rounded at the edges, softer 

          and more willing to listen. 
          my lisa, where have you been?   i am hurried at the mention 

          of her name. here we watch as grief reroutes the sky, makes everything  
          push back out.

          when the birds finally drop through the air  
          they all wear your face

lily someson (she/they) is a poet and essayist from Chicago. She has obtained a B.A. in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago and is a winner of the 2020 Eileen Lannan poetry prize with the Academy of American Poets. She has read at the Poetry Foundation’s Open Door Reading Series and has also been published/is forthcoming in Court Green, Queeriosity (Young Chicago Authors), and Columbia Poetry Review among others. She is currently a first-year Poetry MFA student at Vanderbilt University and an assistant poetry editor of the Nashville Review.

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