05/11/2026
We are committed towards promoting all the poets, and all the supporters of poets, readers, and publishers who help make it all happen.
Today, we are delighted to share Chimeras, by Tegan Zimmerman, published by the equally delightful Inanna Publications! In her debut poetry book, Tegan Zimmerman recuperates and (re)conceives the mythical figure of the chimera to explore maternity, monstrosity, labour, and reproduction. Conceiving chimeras as the maternal and in the plural, not the singular, Chimeras engages repetition and mimicry to critique the western philosophical-literary canon’s paternal roots, grappling with Marx, Plato, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche.
Chimeras brilliantly explores the fragility of identity categories, the slipperiness between the contradictory roles assigned to the maternal: goddess-lover-wife-mother-crone-monster.
Tegan Zimmerman (PhD) holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She is Chair of the Alexa McDonough Institute at Mount Saint Vincent University (2024- 2026) and the Editor of Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice. She specializes in contemporary gender theory and women’s writing that centralizes the maternal and mother-daughter relations. She recently completed a Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Residency at Jampolis Cottage N.S. Her work has appeared in academic journals such as Feminist Theory, MELUS, and Women’s Studies, and she is the author of Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past and Chronotropics: Caribbean Women Writing Spacetime, a co-edited collection with Odile Ferly. She has two beloved Pugs named Kosmo and Canto.
In her debut poetry book, Tegan Zimmerman recuperates and (re)conceives the mythical figure of the chimera to explore maternity, monstrosity, labour, and reproduction.
