Nōmenclātūra

In Nōmenclātūra, a wonderfully imaginative collection of interwoven persona poems, Christine Klocek-Lim invites readers into a world filled with fire, flight, and the fantastic. The 26 poems are spun like fairytales and arranged in alphabetical order, each named after a character with a story of escape or suffering that is simultaneouslysupernatural and corporeal. Indeed, these poems hold profound grief beneath theirdelight and magic: a girl flees a boy who breaks her soul, a man struggles to recover from the experience of war, a girl survives abuse at the hands of her uncle, a couple mourns, separately, the loss of their baby. Klocek-Lim lifts the veil in these poems on all-too-common human traumas, often shrouded in secrecy and misunderstanding, and offers her characters release through the unexpected and surreal grace.

—Ann E. Wallace, author of Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul
(Kelsay Books), 2023-24 Poet Laureate of Jersey City, NJ