Unbrained, by Brenna Womer
Brenna Womer’s latest cross-genre collection examines what Layli Long Soldier calls "unbrained things." In her poem "Head Count," Long Soldier names hormones, nursing, sleeping, night, and blood. In Womer’s collection, she adds shedding, shitting, birthing, fucking, flying, and more to the list.
In the titular hybrid essay, “Unbrained,” first published by Honey Literary, Womer considers her recent Bipolar diagnosis by a psychiatric nurse with whom she had a single appointment and never saw again. In the closing essay, “Thick Like Me,” which won NELLE’s Three Sister’s Prize for Creative Nonfiction, Womer grapples with a matrilineal legacy of relentless identity-seeking and what of her Mexican heritage she can claim after growing up in whitewashed familial spaces and on U.S. military bases.
In her poetry, prose, and hybrid work throughout, Womer interrogates ownership and indulges appetite; she presses through the softness of fur and fat to the hot core of animal innocence. On every page, she asks what’s fair but always comes up empty.
Brenna Womer (she/they) is a queer, childfree, Latine prose writer and poet, and in fall 2023, she’ll join the MFA faculty at Fresno State as an Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction. She holds an MFA from Northern Michigan University and is the author of Honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and two chapbooks. Her creative writing, craft, and reviews have been published in North American Review, Redivider, The Normal School, Indiana Review, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Brenna is a contributing interviewer for SmokeLong Quarterly and has held editorial positions at Moon City Review & Press, Passages North, Story Magazine, and Shenandoah, where she served a year as interim Editor-in-Chief and is now Creative Nonfiction Editor.