What Water Knows
Poems
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Jacqueline Jones LaMon delivers a stunning third collection that shows the elements of life that both unite us and create our greatest distances. What Water Knows transports the reader from drought to drowning, from the transatlantic Middle Passage to the breaking of water, from water wielded as a weapon to used as a reward. LaMon offers a labyrinth to understanding how we are all connected—through vibrant, searing images depicting the core of racism, betrayal, addiction, loss, climate change, and the ever-changing world in which we live.
LaMon’s skillful embodiment of character and her signature use of personae invite the reader to experience the unfathomable. Prepare to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Prepare to feel the force of a fire hose on your bare legs. Prepare to experience what happens when greed gets in the way of reason. What Water Knows is a canonical poetic achievement that will remind us of what it means to be human in a world that often forgets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Water is the central theme of LaMon's meditative third collection (after Last Seen). Divided into three sections ("The Fragile Resilient Life"; "The Open, Empty Mouth"; "The Promise of Relief"), these poems show the extremes of the element, from its lack to its excess, as well as its many historical uses ("This world once survived on our rainwater, collected/ in buckets left outside our doors. Imagine," she notes). Gender and race become implicated, as in "Travelogue," when she writes "This is how a Black woman travels with herself./ Always with herself, and the trail of all her selves.// The possibility, the threat." In "Niagara," a poem about Annie Edson Taylor, who, on her 63rd birthday, became the first woman to travel over Niagara Falls in a barrel, LaMon instructs, "This is how you do it—you think of yourself/ as a part of the current. You, as creator of turbulent// diversion. You, the spark of white/ water crest in pursuit of all things blue and green." This is an ambitious, stirring collection.
