?Chimeras breaks language apart at its softest joints?gnawed, flensed and flayed into bare life?and rebuilds it as encrypted fury.? – Corinne Gilroy, editor and criticn?Chimeras maps the maternal self, dodging patriarchal contradictions with deft cartography. Tegan Zimmerman warns the reader: ?in this earth hall/there can be no apology? and ?no one is more hated than she/who tells the truth?. Chimeras perseveres to ?a thin azure line/ a phallacy to dispel the darkness/ in an other life?. Zimmerman?s Chimeras reaches what can only be seen by the mind?s eye, with an erudition both beautiful and wise.?n n- tSusan Andrews Grace, author of Hypatia?s WakennChimeras reads like a monstrous myth, speculative fiction and a veiled telling of a personal tragedy. The four poems it contains create a narrative layered with meaning from the mythological to the scientific, political to the philosophical, told in an image-rich language that had me dipping (with delight) into my dictionary. Rife with stunning one liners (the chimera is a sculptor of tragedy: woman imitates earth), Chimeras rewrites old texts about women in a new, terrifying and exhilarating way.nAnna Quon, author of Body Parts and Halifax?s Poet Laureate nnExquisite, haunting, fierce, like the maternal chimeras themselves. Drenched in gorgeous images, consistently surprising and rising, demanding we listen, this is a breathtaking debut. Brava! nJocelyn Cullity, author of Amah and the Silk-Winged PigeonsnMyths and mythic creatures have always had a home in poetry. Tegan Zimmerman?s debut poetry collection, Chimera, gives commanding voice to a fiery beast, which she conceives as the communal voice of womanhood. ?The Chimera is a sculptor of tragedy; woman imitates earth,? she writes as the poems reenact the drama of being wife, mother, goddess, crone, and yes, monster. These spare, exacting pieces move in mysterious and surprising ways. What a pleasure to read.nKristine Somerville, Arts and Culture Editor, the Missouri Review nThis is a work that demands to be heard; it will not wait quietly in the corner for you to listen. It cuts at the illusion of modern womanhood with ferocious precision. nKate KrekenZimmerman?s first poetry collection challenges us with the complex image of the chimera ? a mythical monster of Greek legend, yet also an idea which suggests both illusion and possibility. ?The chimera is a sculptor of tragedy: woman imitates earth,? says the poet as she grapples with reproduction and the social distortions imposed upon women?s bodies. Both erudite and poetic, spacious and pointed, these four poems remind us that ?myths need new languages/we must wedge our bodies/our old dead tongues,/through cracks and corridors?? These are poems that disentangle our cultural roots and move us toward clarity and rebirth.nCarole Giangrande, author of This May Be The Year and The Frailty of Living Thingsnn?Chimeras is a brilliantly allusive, feminist critique of the mythical and epistemological monsters of Western literary and philosophical tradition. Each of the book?s four poems begins pregnant with an illusion whose still/birth calls attention to the alchemy between language and biology. In this poetic world, knowledge is not in the movement from the darkness of the cave to the light but in the ?etchings/like a stained glass? made on the ice by the ?metal legs dragging/across the slick surface? when a mechanized myth slips and gets back up. ?Art,? these poems tell us, ?emerges and vanishes in an instant,? and every page of this book is an artful emergence.?nAlison Turner, Curator of the South Dakota Oral History Center and author of Defensible SpacesnChimeras is a collection of poems that are sky bound and on all fours pulling language through the temporal long haul of what it takes to arrive just on the brink of the not yet and the possible. Here?s matriarchal transformation in flux. And here?s how the past, present, and future merge to become like a body of water for private and public revelries and protests to do everything they can to not just stay afloat but to kick with the dignity it takes to swim. What is revelatory is how this poet?s language moves: up to its ears in dirt then gracing a green to the thinking it?s doing. And how its pace and the smoke it leaves in its wake suits exactly right now.n nSue Goyette, Halifax Poet Laureate 2020-2024nBracing itself against its own deft assembly of fragments of ancient and continental philosophy