Waterbaby

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Waterbaby is a multi-faceted self-portrait of a Black woman in America crafted out of poems that take the form of blues songs, letters, stories, dreams, lyric incantations, language-driven fevers, even a music playlist. While making palpable the traumas of Black history, Wallschlaeger draws together intense feelings of grief and horror, to create vibrant, deeply moving sequences, like this one, from “Middle Passage Messaging Service”:

Forbidden trees storages of lives pressed page
flowers herbs in their barbarian jailships on the
horizon bones shake with births, & coughing
keeping it down catching sick on the landform.

Other poems are far more subdued, but while austere in style, they are sometimes even more brutal in their emotional honesty, as is evident in this scene from “Dead to the World Study #3”: “Hold a soul close after they’re gone. You weren’t interested. Gave a half-hug wearing your hair curlers and said, ‘I was just tired’.”

Wallschlaeger strategically deploys overtly political statements and images against her own constantly evolving moods and dispositions, and the result is often richly ambivalent and emotionally surprising. “I’d Come Back from the Grave to Celebrate the End of Capitalism,” for instance, is as much a nostalgia piece for the poet’s youth as it is a forward-looking anticipation of revolution.

Throughout, frustration, anger, suspicion, but also love, self-care, fatigue, and contemplation all align in an ongoing dynamic that feels radically intimate. Given their emotional complexity and numerous formal maneuvers these poems cannot be neatly summarized, but taken together they depict a poet working hard to identify and engage her social and historical positions while simultaneously fighting to resist their containment. As Wallschlaeger puts it: “Inside of my raised fist is a struggling livelihood.”