Like humid Ohio summers, often wistful and lovely, yet undeniably heavy, Naming a Dying Thing by Vic Nogay is a sticky collection. At times a confrontation, at others an abdication, the poems within this offering reckon with the roles of women and mothers in a society that demands they be somehow everything and nothing all at once. Naming a Dying Thing contemplates and subverts success and failure in love and in life, holding both up to a hostile American reality. There are no answers here.
Vic Nogay is a Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction nominated writer from Ohio. She is the author of the micropoetry chapbook under fire under water (tiny wren, 2022) and is the microeditor of Identity Theory. With Naming a Dying Thing, Nogay avows the labor of motherhood and loss, bears the weight of a changing world, and unspools the taut line of memory, leaving the frayed edges to rest out in the sun.
