Waterbaby

Waterbaby

In her astounding third collection, Nikki Wallschlaeger turns to water―the natural element of grief―to trace history’s interconnected movements through family, memory, and day-to-day survival. Waterbaby is a book about Blackness, language, and motherhood in America; about the ancestral joys and sharp pains that travel together through the nervous system’s crowded riverways; about the holy sanctuary of the bathtub for a spirit that’s pushed beyond exhaustion. Waterbaby sings the blues in every key, as Wallschlaeger uses her vibrant lexicon and varied rhythms to condense and expand emotion, hurry and slow meaning, communicating the profound simultaneity of righteous dissatisfaction with an unjust world, and radical love for what’s possible. “Wallschlaeger’s latest collection is political, personal, and timely.”― Publishers Weekly “How can you not be grateful, in such an ugly time, for a poet who so closely and wryly and wrenchingly and furiously observes a nation?”― Chicago Tribune “She deploys a new vocabulary for talking about the legacies of slavery and white supremacy as they manifest in daily life―a vocabulary that is as damning as it is lush, as rich with sound as it is bright with image… The domestic scenes she makes in her poems complicate clichés of who black women in America are ‘supposed’ to be.” ― Hyperallergic “The first-person perspective is harrowing and heartbreaking in its vulnerability and honesty.”― Luna Luna Magazine “Wallschlaeger’s is a poetics of multiplication and plurality.”― Entropy “I admire the grave persistence of her vision, the precision of her eye and ear.”―Joyelle McSweeney Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Brick, American Poetry Review, Witness, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Houses (Horseless Press 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof 2017) as well as the graphic book I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (2019) from Bloof Books. She is also the author of an artist book called “Operation USA” through the Baltimore-based book arts group Container, a project acquired by Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. Women Are Doomed to Be the Angels of Love This is so true I involuntarily doodle hearts everywhere I go. I sign my letters compulsively with hearts, dream of disobedient hearts, work with hearts. I eat them. I boil sauces and the tomatoes on my cutting board form a daisy chain heart. My foot is a pretty ballet slipper, Lisa Frank style, engorged with crusty satin hearts. I pronounce my name with an embarrassingly hearty accent. My colostrums pools with the plumping of an inflamed heart inspired by the nutritional needs of my babies. Hearts are spray-painted on trains like talismans, guiding me eventually to the Heart Afterlife where my treasured friends exist in heart time, drinking wine and organizing a workers collective named Heavenly Valley Emotional Laborers in the mossy hidden Heartclouds where my restless heart tires of hearing famous singers singing sweetly about unsatisfying love in the grocery store when their hearts could be screaming about environmental devastation and global capitalism; the way this callous dorm pillow I saw online plastered with hearts and dream catchers says “only good vibes” is in no way related to what the hearts of this country really need. On good days I submit to being a committed student of the heart. On bad days I am paranoid and anxious about my heart being kidnapped by intruders in blue uniforms, and how a scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where the sacrificial victim’s heart gets ripped out in one of Hollywood’s stereotypical cinematic presentations of indigenous culture nevertheless sent me a message about men who are so powerful they could take what they wanted from my body with their bare hands. “Where do bad folks go when they die?” asks Kurt Cobain on my favorite Nirvana album. I replace “folks” with “hearts” and marvel at the candor of strange smarmy men on TV who want to be president, who have no clue that being part of a community is different than owning investments in a city. My heart is stone sore. My heart wants to close forever, to protect me from market combat. But as someone bred for strength and openness I lack options. I’m pretty good at the precarious art of choosing what gets in. Doom makes a great gatekeeper, it’s rainwater in a vase of roses on a sleeping hero’s grave. Way of the Road “He who builds by the roadside has many masters.” -- German proverb I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to look at it anymore when I opened my eyes again it was still there same raggedy recollections but I was farther down the road than the last time I was willing to rest. The road is an exasperating concept. I’d get sent to jail if I drove the car off into a field of ragweed and chicory but in my mind something resembling freedom would spark until the high