2024 – Glass Lyre Press

buy links: Glass Lyre Press or Amazon

From the author:

This series of poems is an adventure in persona, where I explore what it means to be human from different points of view. Some of the poems are related as the speaker flips from protagonist to antagonist. I chose Nōmenclātūra from the Latin, meaning list of names, because sometimes when you name a thing, it reveals itself to the reader. And sometimes when you give trauma a voice, it becomes less likely to be denied.

Reviews:

In Nomenclatura, 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 simultaneously supernatural and corporeal. Indeed, these poems hold profound grief beneath their delight 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

This collection is beautifully speculative and poignantly real. Women, young and old, rebel against expectations, sometimes violently. Men and women grieve and cause others to grieve. This is a chapbook about life’s raging fires “trailing ashes / and regret / like embers.” It’s about memory and the loss of memory “and her heart’s door…jammed / ajar because sometimes / bones warp after use.” It’s about knowing who you are and who you aren’t, acting in accordance with your nature, knowing that “empires fall softly, like wax hardening / after the wick is gone.” As she always does, Christine Klocek-Lim breathes life and death into images that remain long after you’ve turned the page.
—Larina Warnock, author of Guitar without Strings (The Lives You Touch Publications), The Other Statistic (TEDxRoseburg)

Naomi

Her angel told her not to fall
asleep outside, but Naomi
had never been obedient—
always the wild child.
The girl with the bold
words and songs
no one understood.
And anyway, the sunset had given
her ideas on how to pile
stones at the edge
of the field, like a pyramid
or a temple or a shrine,
and then she’d lost
her shoes in the grass.

An owl hooted.
Trees bent down further
than they ought, trying to see
what she’d done.

This is what happens
when you don’t listen,
her angel said.

Naomi captured a firefly,
thinking it might show
her secrets.
It had light. It could fly.

Her angel fluttered like a broken
leaf above the scene, worried
and righteous.

Naomi let the insect go.
She stretched out her feet and hands.
Watched the moon walk over the mountain
like an old wise woman, face turned
toward the past.

Her angel tried again.
This is not your place.
This is not your home.

Naomi closed her ears and eyes,
remembering her lost dog. Remembering
her dead friend’s cat, how the creature
would stare into the brush
for hours because everyone knew
a mouse lived beneath the world.

Her angel swept wind over the field.
Scattered leaves and dust
as if fear had fingers.

Naomi pulled starlight
over her shoulders and elbows.
Tucked her feet into the hill.
This is my dream, she said.
And I am not
afraid.

-first published in Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, 2016

Acknowledgements:

A previous version of “Emma,” “Fritz,”, and “Loretta” first appeared in Tell Tale Inklings #3, 2017.
“Henry” first appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, 11/29/2015, republished in Escape Into Life, June 2018.
A previous version of “Naomi” first appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, 11/29/2016.
“Roman” first appeared in Escape Into Life, May 2018.