Book of Non (co-written with Rochelle Hurt) — Broadstone Books, July 2023
The central figure in this collaborative poetic treatise from Carol Guess and Rochelle Hurt is NonMom, representative of women who choose “not to be Mom,” or not to be defined/confined by any specific gender role. Which is to say these poems are all about agency, autonomy, and identity, topics of fierce confrontation at the moment, making this book an essential contribution to that struggle. But they also speak for all of the other nons, the nontraditional, nonconforming, nonbinary forms of otherness and queerness. Pandemic isolation finds its way into the story as well, which makes this a book for all of us. Most of all, it’s a book about hope, of finding oneself and of finding community. “For you I imagine a body you will never have. For you I imagine my body and it is not the body I have. For you I use new words to say things I have always known but not known how to say.” In these poems, they find their voice.
