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Making My Madonna by Pamela Gemme

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This title will be released on January 22, 2027

 

Pam Gemme shares life facing an unplanned pregnancy when she was 16. The poems tell of a defiant youth who despite the odds made a life for herself and her daughter. Her attitude though, was not what is stereotypically seen in adolescent rebellion. This goes deeper than that. Systemic barriers– poverty, racism and especially misogyny are built into systems so that teen girls who choose to become mothers have in their lives stacked against them. Pam had to walk away from church, school, and other places that should be there to support youth making difficult life choices. Sometimes jarring, sometimes seeking accountability in Making My Madonna Pam tells us how she found her own answers via her poems. #teenpregnancy #poverty #racism #poetry #misogyny 
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Pamela Gemme is a poet and visual artist. Recent or forthcoming publications: The American Journal of Poetry, Haiku Journal, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Naugatuck River Review, J Journal, SoFloPoJo, Ibbetson Street Press, Mizmor Anthology and others. Pamela works privately with poets to write their trauma, and she runs workshops locally. Pamela co-leads a reading series in Needham, Mass. with the poet Mani Iyer. Most recently her manuscript Making My Madonna received Honorable Mention in the 2025 Slate Roof Press contest. Pamela co-edited Essential Voices: A Covid-19 Anthology from WVU Press released May 22, 2023. Pamela is on the editorial board at the Worcester Review. Pamela is an Ambassador of the National Baseball Poetry’s Festival.

 

PRAISE:

 

Pam’s poems are salt of the earth work.

–Chard diNiord III, Westminster West (Tupelo Press)

 

Gemme’s poems are raw and visceral. They sizzle with the real. These are poems for us–the working class, the marginal, the ones with “rust marks on the bottoms of [our] Levis.”

–Amy Alvarez, Author of Makeshift Altar

 

Pam Gemme is a poet of hard-won truth-telling and resolute defiance. In Making My Madonna she sings out her teenage mother poems, lyric and formal, raising the acts of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood above the common judgements of God and culture, to the chosen privilege of being Naomi’s mother. With a clear eye to the social battering suffered on women and girls, this book honors feminine strength.

–Carol Hobbs, poet, teacher, and mother, and author of New-found-land

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