Contemporary Poetry |1| Mira Gonzalez
Mira Gonzalez is from Los Angeles. Her first collection, i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together, was published by Sorry House at the start of 2013. Since then it has received numerous positive reviews and award nominations and can count Miranda July and Lena Dunham amongst its fans.
Covering topics such as drugs, sex, depression and loneliness, her poems have garnered an impressive reputation for being unremittingly open and reflective of a certain subset of early twentysomethings. Mira writes about paradoxes, pornography and the personal problems of being a young woman in the digital age in a humourous, confessional style that is ready-made for sharing on a medium Mira herself is fantastically adept at using: Twitter. Lines like,
you enjoy being hungry
hunger is a solvable problem
—3.14159265359
and,
what is the difference between being an independent person
and being a person who is accepting of loneliness
—today my alarm went off at 12:30 pm
hint at Mira’s vulnerability but also her bravery in wanting to address questions surrounding her vulnerability, to bring them into the spotlight. None of this is to say that Mira offers any solutions to the various problems she encounters, rather what she offers the reader in her poems is a series of her own coping mechanisms, a series that, to varying degrees, we can all relate to.
At her best, she’s as insightful as any poet; at her worst, she is frustratingly flippant. Ultimately, her poetry mirrors Mira herself: it’s raw yet controlled; self-assured yet openly doubtful; complex yet simple. Mira writes in various forms—she is currently in the process of getting ready to release a new book co-authored with Tao Lin later this year—and having spoken of her aversion to tying herself to poetry it is unknown when or if she will release a second poetry collection. If you’ve yet to encounter her work, now is the perfect time to start.
Follow her on twitter or check out her website here.
