Alicia Rebecca Myers
Alicia Rebecca Myers
Hi! I'm Becca, a poet who received her MFA from NYU. 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.
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.
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 publised by Meadowlark Press in 2025.
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
HOSTESS
If what happens after we die is the same as
what happened before then what
must count is the middle. Like the cream filling
in a Twinkie, how did I get here?
I watch you practicing skills.
I could swoop and holler
till the cows sidle up
to your chub. Here is the church, here is
the crutch of my body keeping
you horizontal only
so long. Hello, how many
in your party? Once in your high chair
it's drop giraffe get giraffe ad
nauseam. Draw me a bath
of dissolvable packing peanuts
and later, I'll tell you the story of how
I rolled around in a mail truck full of other
people's letters, I was that happy
to be your mother.
-- Alicia Rebecca Myers, from My Seaborgium
“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