Familiar Monsters of the Flood is a tight, emotional, and stunning debut collection of poems. Tia McLennan’s mastery of metaphor and concise word choice packs a punch in these poems about intergenerational connection, motherhood, grief, ecology and memory.
The poems in Familiar Monsters of the Flood speak to each other through an invisible connective tissue that weaves together dream space, loss, childhood memory, motherhood, the domestic-gothic, medical-speak, and life’s inevitable bureaucracies. These poems share an uneasiness and a foreboding. In these pages it becomes impossible to distinguish between the grief in losing a father, in losing multiple pregnancies and in losing the planet as we know it to our own destruction. Throughout the deluge of loss, Tia McLennan’s stunning debut collection of poetry is grounded in wonder, the surreal, and the hope gleaned from those peculiar moments that can stop us in our tracks and, for a moment, make us fully present.
