Alicia Rebecca Myers
Alicia Rebecca Myers
Hi! I'm Becca, a poet who received her MFA from NYU. My first full-length manuscript, Warble, was a finalist for the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize and the winner of the 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize. Warble will be published by Meadowlark Press in January, 2025.
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My chapbook of poems inspired by my son, My Seaborgium, was published by Brain Mill Press as part of their Mineral Point Chapbook Series. You can order it here.
I've had three poems published in the Best New Poets series: "G Day" was selected by Anna Journey for Best New Poets 2023, "Winter Solstice" was selected by Kaveh Akbar for Best New Poets 2021, and "The Last Travel Agent" was selected by Tracy K. Smith for Best New Poets 2015.
​​I live in Ithaca, NY with my poet husband and poet son. You can follow my efforts at parenting, writing, and running on Instagram @aliciabecca.
What readers are saying about My Seaborgium:
"I admire the way the book refuses an easy teleology, from loss to a birth, which is a more familiar narrative, and the way the poems complicate experience."
-- Nicole Cooley, author of Of Marriage
"Within each poem, the yin and yang, 'to be both drift and manifold' as in the poem '24 Weeks,' or 'dually as wave and particle' in '33/34 Weeks.' This poem, in particular, describes vividly that duality that comes of being both woman and mother—to be fiercely independent yet so dependent on a life that is so dependent on you. 'Pain tolerance isn’t the same as pain threshold' is a line that stayed with me long after the initial read, perhaps serving as the centrifugal force from which the rest of the book spins."
-- Cathryn Cofell, author of Stick Figure with Skirt
“The poems of My Seaborgium utilize metaphor in an attempt to account for the beauty that emerges from our moments of greatest grief. . . . Even through the pain, Myers’s speaker struggles to pay attention, to unfold that pain in ways that feel particular and personal.”
-- Kiki Petrosino, author of Hymn for the Black Terrific
Warble is now available for preorder!
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize Judge, author of How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems:
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Warble encompasses the poetry of connection to the life force, weaving and unraveling immersions into grief and birth, presence and yearning, mother love and father loss, blossom and flight. These poems are compelling, brave, intimate, and most of all, unafraid of telling the truth. I found that once I started reading them, I couldn’t stop, and I was called back to re-read many stunning dives into the tender and fierce edges of life, such as the complex compassion in “Addling,” the daring energy in “Open Water,” and the breathless love of “You Ask Me to Tell You the Story.” The title itself—Warble—speaks to that in-between state (as well as a bird) of being alive, trilling through each poem.
I picked this collection because of how deeply the poet wrote from what Edward Hirsch calls “the poetry of affection,” the poetry that connect us to our innate and vulnerable humanness. This quality is so vital when it comes to working with the fragments of brokenness, despair, and horror around us to craft a life, sustain a community, and behold the living earth with wonder and courage.