About the Book
Synopsis
How I Remember It is poetry collection; an excavation of one woman's memories to understand just how she ended up so unhappy in her marriage.
Our narrator, a queer Dominican woman, is caught between the heartbreaking end of a 5-year relationship with her ex-girlfriend and the love-bombing glamor of her new love. He effortlessly charms her Christian family through his connection with God and his music, earning himself a permanent fixture in their daily lives.
Things move quickly between them and soon they begin to plan their lives together, even as she comes to realize the depth of his jealous and controlling nature. To make matters worse, she finds herself helplessly drawn to a woman she meets at a waitressing gig she picks up the same summer she becomes engaged to him.
After moving out of their childhood homes, it does not take long for her to see things for what they truly are-a dysfunctional, toxic marriage, littered with secrets, dishonesty, and never ending cycles. To escape, our narrator needs to make the difficult choices, even if it means losing everything she knows.
The Author
Scarlet Gomez is a Dominican Bronx-based poet and writer. She is a divorcee, a hopeless romantic, an artist, performer, and cycle breaker. She's had several short stories and poems published in literary journals such as Persephone's Daughters, Promethean Magazine, Crabs Fat Magazine, Philadelphia Stories, The A3 Review, Deadass Tho.NYC, and Writer's HQ.
She received the Esther Unger Poetry Prize from the City College of New York in 2016 and was recently accepted into the Master's program at the Silberman School of Social Work in Harlem.
The Blurb
I'm sharing this from the depths of muck and truth, trying to understand, to make sense, to sort, to pair the moment with its connecting consequence. Because that's what everyone says.
Everything happens for a reason. Everything unfolds like a landscape after a forest of trees. Except I find that that is not always the case.
There is no deep reason bad things happen. There is no secret meaning in struggling before paradise. We are not proverbs, or wisdom. Sometimes things are and we are just around it. And when it passes, the soil, the water, the trees, the yellowed leaves, the scent of the forest, the sounds, the calls of wild animals, the sky, the air, its thickness, its welcome changes. It all changes.
