Nikki Wallschlaeger, Waterbaby

 

Lost in America

Among the killings. Among the permits. Among the dull transparency. Among the hunger. Among the family beyond my reach. Among the labor pool. Among that type of bread. Among the registered voters, among the paperless statements. Among the eye of the beholder. I’m lost among your ethics. Among New World glossaries. Among the page of windows. I’m lost inside your mesosphere on what’s toxic and what’s not—in America. I am certainly lost at the political match. Among recurring wars no one dares to injure on the ride home. Among the ink tracking, MY GOD, new moods helping to reimagine a world beyond the sunrise. Among the maps they used to leave in our hair. “Celia god away, bad hip and all.” Among electronic billboards jammed with the Black faces of runaways, don’t call this toll-free number if you see her armed and dangerous, healing from the law. Among marijuana fields owned by the same old same old. Against the embargo of time.

Wisconsin-based poet Nikki Wallschlaeger’s third full-length poetry title, following Houses (Horse Less Press, 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017), is Waterbaby (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2021), a collection that “turns to water—the natural element of grief—to trace history’s interconnected movements through family, memory, and day-to-day survival. Waterbaby is about Blackness, language, and motherhood in America; about the ancestral joys and sharp pains that travel together through the nervous system’s crowded riverways; about the holy sanctuary of the bathtub for a spirit that’s pushed beyond exhaustion.” Wallschlaeger writes on dislocation and consequence, history and exhaustion, speaking directly through writing slant. “Is that your house he asked,” she writes, to open “When the Devil Leads Us Home and Yells Surprise,” “This used to be my house I said // But those are not your people / So that can’t be your house [.]” She writes of grief, and the delicate nature of maintaining a foundation. “Hell investigates life with great opportunity,” she offers, to end the poem “Prayer Sonnet,” “My lil candle mouth kindling for the wounded / when the stars are committed to the worst timing / & no one wants to get out of bed in the morning [.]” She writes of survival, trauma and invisible labour, including mothering, as the poem “This Body Keeps the Keys” writes, offering: “where I splash unapologetic / on how deep this umbilical gets / slumped from getting over, // hair unwashed, toenails randy / as hell because I am sincerely / mothered the fuck out, so tired, / this mothering body, [.]” She writes on how the body maintains, even beyond a point of breaking. “The elders have a saying,” she writes, to end the poem “I’d Come Back from the Grave to Celebrate the End of Capitalism,” “the beat goes on: Earth’s fracturing lifelihoods / resurrected by the rhythms of the night.”

The grief throughout the collection is palpable, writing even beyond the point of pure exhaustion, everything that had occurred up to this particular point a full weight directed into the lyric of her subjects. “Not sure what we can say / except to repeat the obvious,” she writes, as part of “100-Year Flood,” “and some aren’t ungrateful / for an interruption.” Further on, in the same piece, offering: “What happens when you / struggle for generations / and a storm ejects what you’re / still struggling for?” In an interview around the collection, conducted by M. Buna and posted in April on the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wallschlaeger responds:

Waterbaby is a reckoning with grief. Personal, historical, familial, and societal. Losing a loved one was the main catalyst for this book. One grief washes another, and then another and another. Is grief clean? A good cry feels good. I started writing this book before she died — preparing to be transformed forever. It’s been a wild four years — inside and out.

The poems directed at William Shakespeare, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams are a particular highlight; as with much of the collection, these poems are sharp and witty, and wonderfully delightful, offered in a manner almost sly in its playfulness, directed as conversation and even confrontation, offering another version of her astute offering of alternate perspectives. Through the prose lyric, Wallschlaeger confronts the limitations of classic works, and allows the notion that “what poetry is” or “should be” as something that requires updating, having evolved in tone and purpose across the decades, and even centuries, since these particular standard-bearers were active. The fact that the pieces she references, as well, are not only so well known but responded to by so many before her only makes the freshness and originality of her approach that much more striking. As her poem “Robert Frost” begins: “Oh, Robert. Go to bed. I know these woods better than you do, and / your faithful horse is trying to tell you something.” Or “William Carlos Williams,” that begins: “After I left we hung it in the sky, so everyone can see what Black / women have done for the world.” As the two-stanza prose piece ends:

“William,” I said, reaching through the wind to grab his ear. He was walking with a black umbrella and enjoying the mild rain shower. There was a farmhouse coming up the road with a wheelbarrow in the front yard. Someone kind had planted red geraniums in it. He slowed and faced the direction I was pointing, noticing for the first time the homely little wheelbarrow. Smile lines broke through the slow earth of his face. Something good was happening, he was sure of it—and so was I, because I told him.