<em>Making Water</em></br>Laura Jaramillo

In the sorrowful Making Water, Laura Jaramillo’s poems pivot just out of typical light into glamorous and eerie sun. Water here acts as a medium for these intimate elegies, its movements irreducible as the effect of one person’s life on another’s. The speaker has done a disappearing act, letting water exist as disembodied, plasmic, and thorough. More than once, I felt like I was staring at a living still, a tribute to the cinema. But then one feels Jaramillo at work, giving probing attention to synergistic energy, to using one dimension of the real to uplift another. The voice in these poems struggles with the gruesomeness of ownership en gros. It’s the sovereignty she despises that edges into the foreground, as in the refrain “edge of vomit, edge of everything.” These words land, poured into a glass: the paradox of being pained by borders and containers, but roused by the forces that survive. It’s this tension that leads us to hold our breath at the dream that water, itself, dreams.
— Cynthia Arrieu-King

Fall 2022
110 pages, 6 x 8 inches
Paperback Poetry
978-1-7330384-5-4
$19 U.S.