Synkroniciti is proud to welcome back Houston poet and writer Sandi Stromberg with “An Inconvenient Daughter,” a poem celebrating the audacity of becoming the person we choose to be rather than the person others expect. This daughter is spunky, self‑reliant, and gloriously uninterested in pleasing anyone who would prune her into compliance. But Sandi reminds us that such sovereignty is not innate—it is forged.
“She was born witch-/ grass into a family,// causing disorder/ in their flowering field.”
We often look up to these fully individuated feminist women and imagine they were born confident, unshakeable, already fluent in their own power. Sandi gently corrects that myth. They are not different from us; they are simply further along the winding path of becoming. Her poetry is fresh, formally elegant and decisive, and delightfully unrepentant for the good trouble it stirs—an invitation to trust our own unruly growth.
Read “An Inconvenient Daughter” in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Sandi Stromberg, author of Frogs Don’t Sing Red, has just published her second poetry collection, Moonlight, Shaken. Her poems have recently been accepted by The Orchards Poetry Journal, Panoply, MockingHeart Review, and Synkroniciti—and have appeared in Pulse, Equinox, Gyroscope Review, San Pedro River Review, and The Senior Class, among others. An editor at The Ekphrastic Review, she also edited two anthologies of poetry—Untameable City and Echoes of the Cordillera. A four-time Pushcart and two-time Best of the Net nominee, she was a juried poet in the Houston Poetry Fest eleven times. Dutch translations of her poems have appeared in Brabant Cultureel.