My Mother's Armoire, by Rina Shamilov

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

My Mother’s Armoire is a debut chapbook collection that delves into the connection between bodies and their multitudinous parts. Told from multiple perspectives—experimental, frantic, tender, and deeply emotion-driven—the collection crafts a biological landscape that bridges the physical and the immaterial.

In this work, the body is both beautiful and grotesque, focusing on the primordial and intimate: the connections between sinews, veins, and fluids. At its core, the body emerges as an inherited vessel, passed down from parent to child, serving as a central point of connection between the author and her mother.

Rina Shamilov is a poet from Brooklyn, New York, thrilled to have left the vibrant and overstimulating NYC landscape for scenic Indiana. Her poetry explores self, grief, family, and movement, and she writes to preserve memory and feeling. She is a nonfiction editor at MAYDAY and a managing editor at the Notre Dame Review. Her poetry has either been published or is forthcoming in The Foundationalist, Club Plum Lit, Mulberry Literary, Pink Disco, Udolpho, and VENUUS, and she has written a poetry review for Heavy Feather Review. She has written nonfiction pieces for Lilith, The Forward, and New Voices, where she serves as an arts and culture editor.