The Home of Milk, by Chelsea Wills

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The Home of Milk is a debut collection of poems born out of deep connection with becoming in here and now. This collection is about the liminal sweetness and revulsion of early parenting. In these pages we find glimpses of presence and clear-eyed aliveness. All the while, it is in conversation with the lineage of those influenced by leftover breakfast cereal, politics of awe, a nagging pandemic, patti smith, lullabies from Leonard Cohen, the possibility of next seasons seeds.

She weaves her longtime work as a visual artist into this work with her exacting descriptions of ordinary moments which are precise and unflinching. Her work troubles the notion of where poetry lies and who it is for by placing it in the everyday. 

Chelsea Wills is an artist and writer based in Northern California. Her work exists at the nexus of place, change, and stories. This takes her to faraway places, like Mayan kitchens, crumbling haciendas, and megacity markets of Mexico, and also close to home, from the shoreline of Northern California and the last tenacious farms in the Silicon Valley to her own home garden. Her writing and art have been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Jose Museum of Art, Kala Art Institute, and more. She is the 2024 Anne Marie Oomen Fellow at Poetry Forge.

You can find her @chelseawillsstudio and chelseawills.substack.com