What Water Knows
A typical poem in Jacqueline Jones LaMon’s third collection, What Water Knows, might begin with its speaker musing about speed limits, or pausing to sip some water while delivering a speech. Like a river is made up of individual water droplets, LaMon’s collection excels in tying together these small narrative moments in order to ask how one might find stability in a world of constant fluidity, always in flux.
In this collection, water embodies all its usual metaphoric and poetic qualities, “so cool and full of song,” but What Water Knows goes deeper still. Ambitious poems that reference the Flint water crisis, the Keystone pipeline, and even the COVID-19 pandemic, explore the precarity and turbulence of our relationship with water, one at risk of sudden transformation, or even evaporation. In “What Happens When a Brother Flees” water is never able to put out the torches of a lynch mob, their “torches held high above their heads, creating / smoke signs.” Other poems envision the body in states of thirst, conditions of drought or unbearable heat; LaMon is more than aware that for many, water is unpotable, inaccessible, too easily weaponized, and saturated by legacies of racial and gendered violence flowing back to the transatlantic Middle Passage. With an intimate and meditative lens, the collection draws these concerns together, revealing how stories of water are all connected.
The collection, which feels harmonious in its structure, is split into three sections, perhaps a gesture to the three chemical states of water. Many of the poems end on the rule of three, as in this closing line from “The Wholeness, Beyond Everything We Know”: “The offer. The acceptance. The new consideration.” These tripartite motifs rarely feel gimmicky, but offer the impression of a watermark, a narrative tide flowing back in, something to return to and to anchor the collection. Through its standout prose-poems, as well as its many memorable persona-poems—including a brilliant nine-page poem about going over Niagara Falls—What Water Knows asks us to never forget the creative and nourishing possibilities of a world that “once survived on our rainwater, collected / in buckets left outside our doors.”