MELTWATER

Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm

Poet and world-bender Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater—her third collection, out this month from Milkweed Editions—opens with an unraveling. Inviting the reader into a world beautifully crafted out of biology and memory, Meltwater steps into a liminal landscape where “the starry outlines of men float like bubbles between us and oblivion” and “you are already prey, and everything out here means you harm.” The instinct that ebbs within these poems knows motherhood as hunger, as thirst, as guilt and witness. As ever-shifting as it is ancient, this dystopia looks like me, like my mother, like yours, and it is dangerous. Life holds hands with death here and they both mourn.

How, then, does Wahmanholm manage to craft this insurmountable tragedy, this weight to carry, into life? The same way mothers do—by braiding prose, erasures, and elegies into sacrifice, where sacrifice is always love and sometimes already grief. “The baby / is so sweet that my eyes leak when they brush against her,” she writes and again I see my mother, I see myself as her firstborn and daughter, and I feel the urgency when Wahmanholm confesses “My mind / is a snarl of corners around which death is always / waiting.” I see the sharp edges, and I feel grief for what is still living inside this work.

And so I must say, everything about this collection explodes: the world at war with itself, the body at war with itself, the speaker at war with herself. The multitudes cratered by the explosions crawl into me as I read and begin to exist in this space between the pages. Everything is liminal. Everything is plural. “Everything was a wound that needed to be burned closed but I wanted to bleed out.”

Claire Wahmanholm is a poet of devastating inevitability, of all the living that comes after the apocalypse, and Meltwater is “a vast, organic machine / running like static behind everything.”

Milkweed Editions

—Review by Allison Flory

BLUEST NUDE

Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe

Ama Codjoe’s debut collection Bluest Nude brims with paintings, photographs, and sculptures, which serve as more than source material for ekphrastic poetry; Codjoe brandishes art, particularly art created by Black women, as a medium with which to materialize her poetic project. Codjoe interacts with these artists and their work such that the poem that follows becomes an extension of the visual piece that precedes it, as if the poetry of now is grasping hands with the visual art of the past. 

One example of this timeless connection comes from “Detail from ‘Poem after Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,’” which meditates on Betye Saar’s 1972 piece. Time and image seem to collapse as the speaker “[beholds] a sea / of blood, dark as syrup, oozing / from Aunt Jemima’s neck, / and four women flying, without shoes / or wings, from her maternal, amber body,” making it clear that the liberation of Aunt Jemima is still ongoing. 

Juxtaposed with myriad artistic and cultural references are exquisite vignettes of personal experience. Various intimacies are entangled in the soft and moody language of this collection, which nurses a quiet eroticism throughout. Codjoe explores all the possibilities of womanhood and sex, from being perceived in the “fractured angles of sex” to the speaker’s lament, “Oh, to be a stone, sexless and impenetrable.” 

The simultaneous desire for sex and sexlessness is echoed in the coexistence of motherhood and non-motherhood. Codjoe asks, Is it labor that makes a mother? If so, which kind(s)? The ambiguity of mothering leads to one of the most electric moments in the collection: “I hid / my tears from my mother because that’s what mothers do.” Here and throughout Codjoe’s work, womanhood undulates and continually unfurls.

Milkweed Editions

—Review by Sylvia Foster

SHORT FILM STARRING MY BELOVED'S RED BRONCO

Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver

Winner of the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is the poet’s debut collection, and an intimate tribute to “Missy,” the speaker’s transmasc beloved who “never got his new name” and died by suicide. Iver’s poems meditate on cycles of abuse, queer love, collective griefs and traumas—the undercurrents that led the speaker to where they ultimately leave us. 

The collection complicates its own elegiac beat. Look to “Anti Elegy,” its lines split almost into half-lines, as though the caesuras might forge a route from top to bottom—like some kind of fracture or crack of the heart. Almost stubbornly, the poem imagines how the world would be with Missy still in it: “You might’ve / struck the impos-   sible: surgery, / a new name, your   own boat, & / someone beautiful   to name it after.” But the speaker quarrels with the ethics of their grief, which they describe as “righteous / & problematic.” 

After terming their grief “a loose dam,” they write, “Still, I talk to water   that unrivered / your body for dirt.   I float fantasies / of dirt that holds   us up. Longer. / I say to the water   if you were here, / you’d be here.” 

So, too, the pauses in the poem’s lines come to “re-river” the body of the speaker’s beloved; the speaker takes the matter into their own hands.

The poems are truly in a league of their own; I’ve never read another book like this one. Such a magnetically raw exploration of grief is a gift—and a comfort, to those who seek it. 

This collection couldn’t come at a better time, needed amidst heightening anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiments and attacks on trans healthcare, as well as trans lives. After reading this book, each time I see a headline that sears my heart, I think of a particular moment in Iver’s poem, “Mississippi, Missing, Missy, Miss—”: “That is to say I am inconsolable. / Every day a new definition // of inconsolable. Yesterday: I have a body / and you don’t. Today: your villain is a place.”

Milkweed Editions

—Review by Jami Padgett