Brenna Womer is an absolute force on the page. With bold, incisive prose and frank clarity of voice, Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance examines familial inheritance and self-determination and what it means to inhabit the female body on one’s own terms. This hybrid chapbook is essential and necessary, and a beautiful debut from an immensely talented writer.
-Anne Valente, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down
Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance evokes a state of becoming: a journey marked by Ragu jars and crawdads, French Roast Folgers and Forever Blonde shampoo. Brenna Womer steps lightly between poetry and prose, offering a narrative at once tenderly personal and fiercely honest. What does it mean, she asks, to exist inside the fraught territory of a woman’s body? Her answers will twist around your heart, tighten to the pulse of I am, I am, I am.
-Allegra Hyde, Of This New World
In Atypical Cells, Brenna Womer writes about captured things: butterflies and crawdads, mothers and cervixes. She writes that her dad “was not used to telling me the hard things,” so she tells us herself. The constrictions that are hard marriage, hard Mason jars, hard examination tables at the doctors’ offices, and hard stances on soft bodies, are, through Womer’s glorious jail-key-turning sentences, what sets these butterflies, crawdads, mothers, and bodies free.
-Nicole Walker, Micrograms
