Episode 58: Angela M. Brommel

Listen to this week's featured guest, poet, Angela M. Brommel.  We discuss her influence & her new poetry collection, "Mojave in July". We also talk about her past & current projects supporting the art & literary community as an art curator & Editor-in-Chief at the Citron Review.

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Mojave in July

by Angela M. Brommel

You can’t explain to friends from home how the desert makes it better, but you try:

Imagine a heat so dry that it presses down into the earth, releasing its scent so that it takes on the comforting smell of clay pots in your grandmother’s kitchen when you were a child, or your hideout under the evergreens where you used to sit for hours smelling only the dirt, the sap, the pine.

Imagine a smell that reminds you of the kitchen on holidays: sage, rosemary, and something you chase that is reminiscent of honey, but feels like love.

Some people still fight it. They call the heat oppressive, they call it unrelenting. They have not learned how to live within it.

You must learn to smell the water beneath the surface.

You must learn to let the heat pass through you,
warming your bones, your ligaments, and all the pieces
that you call you.

Let the heat draw out everything unneeded.
Let it put you to bed midday.
Let it make you new.

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Images/Angela M. Brommel
Book cover image art/Su Limbert

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BIO: Angela M. Brommel is a Nevada writer with Iowa roots. In 2018, her chapbook, Plutonium & Platinum Blonde, was published by Serving House Books. Her poetry has been published in The Best American Poetry blog, The North American Review, The Literary Review’s (TLR) Share, and many other journals and anthologies. A 2018 Red Rock Canyon Artist in Residence, Angela served as the inaugural poet of the program. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University and an MA in Theatre from the University of Northern Iowa. Mojave in July is her debut full-length poetry collection. Angela is the Executive Director of the Office of Arts & Culture as well as affiliate faculty in Humanities at Nevada State College. You can also find her at The Citron Review as Editor-in-Chief.