Publisher Description

Jacqueline Jones LaMon delivers a stunning third collection that shows the elements of life that both unite us and create our greatest distances. What Water Knows transports the reader from drought to drowning, from the transatlantic Middle Passage to the breaking of water, from water wielded as a weapon to used as a reward. LaMon offers a labyrinth to understanding how we are all connected—through vibrant, searing images depicting the core of racism, betrayal, addiction, loss, climate change, and the ever-changing world in which we live.
 
LaMon's skillful embodiment of character and her signature use of personae invite the reader to experience the unfathomable. Prepare to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Prepare to feel the force of a fire hose on your bare legs. Prepare to experience what happens when greed gets in the way of reason. What Water Knows is a canonical poetic achievement that will remind us of what it means to be human in a world that often forgets.

Author Biography

Jacqueline Jones LaMon is the author of two award'winning collections of poetry, Last Seen and Gravity, U.S.A., as well as a novel, In the Arms of One Who Loves Me. Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Adelphi University, she has served as president of the Cave Canem Foundation.

Table of Contents

• I: This Fragile, Resilient Life
• No One Eats Icicles Anymore
• Her Silk Scarf Was Blood-Soaked by I-495
• Travelogue
• What Happens When a Brother Flees
• Up the River
• "Governor Snyder Drinks Flint Water"
• Pipeline
• Lemonade
• Mob
• Six
• Niagara
• Ownership
• What Is Human, or Culture, or Left Hanging in the Air
• All That We Need to Be Happy
• On Watch for the Spontaneous
• The Garonne River Shifts Her Direction
• Classification Is the Beginning of Our Greatest Understanding
• Nine to the Limit
• Prodigal
• The Browning
• II: The Open, Empty Mouth
• We Could Walk into the Waters, or Leave Life as It Seems
• Thermostat
• This Wholeness, Beyond Everything We Know
• With a View of the Water from Stable, Cleared Ground
• Disregarding the Alarm
• The Night Before Euthanasia
• What We Wear to Meet the Water
• Cleansing My Mother's Cold Body
• The Merchant Seaman's Wife
• Rockaway
• And All the Rest Will Have Washed Away
• Quiet on the Set
• Still Life
• Polar Vortex
• My Body Speaks of Hatred
• Water, Water Everywhere, But How Am I to Drink?
• Martini
• III: The Promise of Relief
• The Latitude, The Longitude, and a Third Axis Called Time
• Socratic
• We Put So Much Faith in the Power of Doors
• Cruise to Nowhere
• Bathwater
• Breaking & Entering
• Ornithology
• Aftermath
• Holding
• Boarding the Six Train at Brooklyn Bridge
• No Matter What the Incline, The River Around Us Still Flows
• Primate
• The Death and the Dying, A Million Times Over
• It Is Happy Hour, Somewhere
• There Are Some Things We Can't Create in Life
• There are Sixty-Five Steps Between There and Here
• The Only Time We Think of It Is When It's No Longer There
• Bay One
• Currency
• What To Do When Everything Gets Tossed from the Vessel
• And Tomorrow, We Learn to Name the Air
• Skully
• In the Beginning
• Commitment
• That Which We Reach for When Given the Chance
• Acknowledgements

Review

"Such a vibrant and beautiful book. I truly read it with my heart in my throat. LaMon speaks a language at once as familiar and foreign as love itself—with so much love. There is such a deep quietude to this book. She takes us beneath the covers of what it means to be a woman, to be a mother, to be Black, to be trapped—and finally, what it means to be free. I cannot wait for this book to be in the world. Everything I needed right now." — Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award winner and the author of Red at the Bone: A Novel

"With intimacy and clarity, What Water Knows offers us transcendent, lyric language that explores womanhood, race, history, justice, love, and the politics of our identities contained by the memory of water, released by it, or both. Fluid in her craft, LaMon's powers are fully claimed here. In a poem about womanhood, she writes 'We were our own fine line, / never crossed.' Elsewhere LaMon asks a timeless question for us all: 'What is it you need when you're fleeing your home?' The poet's intuition and intelligence rise and crest without ending, and in remarkable turns of self-knowledge, strength, and grace, the intimations of water are as elusive and marvelous as the poet's desire. Indispensable and elemental, What Water Knows achieves a truth that does not spare our most primal needs. Aware of the ordinary and celestial energy of language itself, and what it may mean to choose to speak at all in any form, the poet writes, 'Some would say there are no oceans between us, only / land. I would say it all depends on the direction we choose to face.'" — Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Seeing the Body: Poems

Review Quote

"With intimacy and clarity, What Water Knows offers us transcendent, lyric language that explores womanhood, race, history, justice, love, and the politics of our identities contained by the memory of water, released by it, or both. Fluid in her craft, LaMon's powers are fully claimed here. In a poem about womanhood, she writes 'We were our own fine line, / never crossed.' Elsewhere LaMon asks a timeless question for us all: 'What is it you need when you're fleeing your home?' The poet's intuition and intelligence rise and crest without ending, and in remarkable turns of self-knowledge, strength, and grace, the intimations of water are as elusive and marvelous as the poet's desire. Indispensable and elemental, What Water Knows achieves a truth that does not spare our most primal needs. Aware of the ordinary and celestial energy of language itself, and what it may mean to choose to speak at all in any form, the poet writes, 'Some would say there are no oceans between us, only / land. I would say it all depends on the direction we choose to face.'" --Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Seeing the Body: Poems

Details