Waterways by lisa kemmerer

A warning: you might want to read this book with your shoes and socks off, ready to feel the squish and squelch of bog water, creek water, moist ferns. Be prepared for wet grass, polar rivers, or a drying canal like the one Lisa and I waded into when we spent a bright October day scooping fish with our bare hands out of their steadily shrinking world and transporting them to the wider, more certain Yellowstone River. Like those fish, the poems in Waterways are all about flow and loss. But were the fish constrained by time or was time contained in water? For poet Lisa Kemmerer, imagination and memory converge, playful alliteration and serious philosophy eddy, and observation and emotional connection turn the tide on what we think we know. Why, she makes us wonder, do our characterizations of those we call “other” (and lesser) blind us to “what is blatantly clear / in a fish’s eye,” to what is whole and “undaunted” in a little girl’s heart, or to the debt Bach owed the Marsh Wren when he borrowed her “necessary notes … previously dropped”?

–Cara Chamberlain, author of To Gaze Upon Their Loveliness