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 a Bipolar diagnosis from 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.


In praise of UNBRAINED—

“Brenna Womer’s Unbrained is unfettered and unashamed. The poems and essays in this passionate hybrid collection dare us to face the pus and piss along with the shame and grief that come with being human, especially a human in the hard-won body of a woman of color. With staggering honesty, Womer interrogates the self and the self’s tenuous relationship with her ever-shifting world, calling out racist microaggressions as swiftly as she calls out her own internalized racism. The haunting handwritten title piece, a photo essay, clinches the intimacy the entire book strives toward. The intimacy, the voice of a friend who is hungry to tell us the truth. And all the truth, Womer tells.”

-Eugenia Leigh, author of BIANCA

“’I wished we could stay in the in-between,’ the speaker in the lyric essay ‘Distancing’ longs to linger in the liminal space of a childhood past with her mother. This longing encapsulates what Womer masterfully accomplishes with Unbrained. The stunning collection wraps us in the in-betweens—those of genre, form, identity, body, history, family, mental health, and the preconceived notion of any one of these. Womer has crafted a brilliant hybrid work that braids creative nonfiction and fiction with poems ranging from short lyrics to sequences, and erasures, counterpunctuals, as well as experimental forms in between. Through its inbetweeness, Womer’s writing challenges what we think of as lyric and narrative, song and story, demanding a radical revolution of both. Unbrained is not just a book you must read, it’s one you must experience in body and mind as you surrender a bit of both to its incantatory world of words.”

-Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of 40 WEEKS

88 pages, Paperback

Published December 28, 2023

About the author

Brenna Womer (she/they) is a queer, childfree, Latine prose writer and poet and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno. She’s the author of the full-length, mixed-genre collections Unbrained (FlowerSong Press, 2023) and Honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), as well as the chapbooks Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018) and cost of living (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her work has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.

Brenna was a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at W&L University in rural Virginia from 2021–2023, where she served as interim Editor-in-Chief of Shenandoah, and at Louisiana State University for the 2020/21 academic year, where she served as Faculty Advisor for New Delta Review and the Delta Mouth Literary Festival. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Michigan University as well as an MA in English and a BA in English Literature from Missouri State University. At NMU, she was an Associate Editor of Passages North and served as an Assistant Editor of Moon City Review and Intern for Moon City Press at Missouri State. Brenna was raised on Air Force bases in the US and abroad and now resides in Fresno with her rescue pups Honey, Dot, & Pico.

Reviews

[Nadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another excellent book by Brenna! Poignant and honest, weaving through poetry and prose to tell a story.

[Shannon Wolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply intimate and confessional, self-critical and sympathetic. I appreciate the blend of genres and forms and the sense of a tightly built world even in the shortest piece. Delicious to devour in one before-bed sitting.

[Catherine Livesay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very thought provoking. I read it in one sitting.

[Haven Burney]

Really good set of short poems that are modern and relatable

[lellysbooknook · Rating 4 out of 5]

i am always so intrigued by the authenticity in which womer writes! their words feel so real as if i know the “me” throughout the whole collection.