What Water Knows

Water is the central theme of LaMon’s meditative third collection (after Last Seen). Divided into three sections (“The Fragile Resilient Life”; “The Open, Empty Mouth”; “The Promise of Relief”), these poems show the extremes of the element, from its lack to its excess, as well as its many historical uses (“This world once survived on our rainwater, collected/ in buckets left outside our doors. Imagine,” she notes). Gender and race become implicated, as in “Travelogue,” when she writes “This is how a Black woman travels with herself./ Always with herself, and the trail of all her selves.// The possibility, the threat.” In “Niagara,” a poem about Annie Edson Taylor, who, on her 63rd birthday, became the first woman to travel over Niagara Falls in a barrel, LaMon instructs, “This is how you do it—you think of yourself/ as a part of the current. You, as creator of turbulent// diversion. You, the spark of white/ water crest in pursuit of all things blue and green.” This is an ambitious, stirring collection. (June)