Waterbaby

Nikki Wallschlaeger

Forthcoming April 2021

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.

Paperback: $16.00 list price

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ISBN: 9781556596131

Format: Paperback

This Body Keeps the Keys

My dear sparkly eyed polyps,
I don’t have enough juice to
be the sole joist of this family
today

so I dream of clawfoot tubs
where I splash unapologetic
on how deep this umbilical gets
slumped from getting over,

hair unwashed, toenails randy
as hell because I am sincerely
mothered the fuck out, so tired
this mothering body,

shellac lying facedown on a
coastline ashing & mottled
pockmarked canker sorrel
no good pictures of myself,

skinbag workhorse bb creamery
constant upkeep of management
cultivation of self-care cosmetic
black pride goddess goddamn

this shit get tiresome putting so
much effort into what doesn’t last
sometimes I want to retire shave
my head be a nun or a monk,

just so I can forget all the years
time bludgeoned so I could look like
somebody else swimming around
in their own pallid wheel of tears.

Yemaya, what is to become of us.
I drag my body around lovingly
but it still won’t let me go

About the Author

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 …

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