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.
She has worked as an editor, teacher and freelance writer and has for many years been involved in the Calgary literary community. Her short stories and poetry have been published in dozens of literary journals and anthologies as well as being broadcast on CBC radio and performed on the Women’s Television Network. Numerous reviews, essays and articles have appeared in a wide range of publications including newspapers such as The Globe and Mail and journals as varied as Westworld and Canadian Literature. Her novel, A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing, was shortlisted for the 2009 Writers Guild of Alberta George Bugnet Fiction Award and she is a three-time recipient of the WGA Short Fiction Award. She has also won awards for play writing.
the chimera has always known these things:
this is her allegory
and it began in the cave…
soon, the burying time will begin for those who will be born,
then
for those who will not.
hear the ancient war machine hum?
a violation
I am a fatherless creature
summoned.
scent of the slaughterhouse,
relentless rage,
we are trapped:
the closed-mouth goddess is dead.
this is an accusation, an implication, a crisis:
a headless baby with three bodies—
ides,
aglǽc-wífes,
old
are we
in this earth hall
there can be no apology.
wreathing the way we did…
meadow moon-blooms
wide-wandering
too close to the light
his thumbs, rubber-gloved, push and pry:
paraded down the passageway
nothing but carved objects
says the one known by many names
He says you are not my mother:
but an inextricable shadow…lamenting
the disconsolate,
strange swamp
dance
we performed together:
what is the point of ritual
if not for our lips to speak together?
“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 critic
“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.”
– Susan Andrews Grace, author of Hypatia’s Wake
“Chimeras 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.”
– Anna Quon, author of Body Parts and Halifax’s Poet Laureate
“Exquisite, haunting, fierce, like the maternal chimeras themselves. Drenched in gorgeous images, consistently surprising and rising, demanding we listen, this is a breathtaking debut. Brava!”
-Jocelyn Cullity, author of Amah and the Silk-Winged Pigeons
“Myths 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.”
– Kristine Somerville, Arts and Culture Editor, the Missouri Review
“This 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.”
-Kate Kreke, poet
“Zimmerman’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.”
– Carole Giangrande, author of This May Be The Year and The Frailty of Living Things
“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.”
– Alison Turner, Curator of the South Dakota Oral History Center and author of Defensible Spaces
Chimeras 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.
– Sue Goyette, Halifax Poet Laureate 2020-2024 and author of Monoculture
“Bracing itself against its own deft assembly of fragments of ancient and continental philosophy, pop culture and contemporary daily life, the 4 parts of the chimera that is this book construct something simultaneously lyrically shimmering and monstrous, deeply personal and mythic. Chimeras is oblique, searching, and spare and, in the end, incandescent in its grief. An astonishing debut.”
-Clare Goulet, author of Graphis scripta: writing lichen and director of the MSVU Writing Centre
