Overview

Everything Is Water is an open letter to caregivers as the speaker grapples with her partner's life-threatening illness, pregnancy and new motherhood, and marriage. Growing up on the Virginia coast, the speaker knows the water's danger and allure--asks, what is beneath, what has control in so much open and unknown space? The speaker continues to feel this unease in everything as she navigates fear, identity, and loss. Everything is water. Everything is the surface tension created by the unknown. The collection often returns to the water and those inhabiting it, but it also looks to winged creatures, those on land, and those who are in between elements as they wrestle with their own survival. Water is an element that sustains and devours. When danger comes, we wonder when it will end. We ask how we can live with loss. Is it easier to run away? To let go? Everything Is Water leaves the reader suspended, treading water alongside the speaker as she seeks to answer these questions. The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Virginia

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9781680034585

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Reviews

""The scars I've forged / on my skin. It wasn't much, / but a life"" writes Chelsea Krieg, and what a life this poet has forged here for us. A life of ghost mothers and new mothers, grief and renewal, chemotherapy and Evel Knievel, and always, throughout Everything Is Water, a current that is swift-moving, well-crafted, and reaching for love. --Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route --Matthew Olzmann Chelsea Krieg's Everything Is Water, is a carefully observed record of love, grief, fear, and wondrous fascination. Intent on the multitude of ways we live inextricably tied to one another, these poems of daughterhood, motherhood, selfhood, and marriage traverse and collapse a wide range of territories: gorgeously entwining the wild and the domestic, the mythical and the clinical. This book is a striking reckoning with what it means to be mortal--and to love other mortals--in a world that seems intent on reminding us again and again just how impermanent we are. --Molly McCully Brown, author of In the Field Between Us --Molly McCully Brown Chelsea Krieg's debut Everything Is Water is an unwavering exploration of motherhood, marriage, and survival. In clear-eyed, intimate poems, Krieg charts the course of a woman's life reshaped by motherhood and marriage in the aftermath of a husband's cancer diagnosis. These poems excavate the silent labor of caregiving, the fracture of partnership under strain, and the fierce, aching devotion of a mother fighting to hold everything together. Through parallels with the natural world--animal bodies and bodies of water--these poems face the grief and awe that comes with living on this earth, and trace the metamorphosis of a self-transformed by trauma and tenderness alike. --Leila Chatti, author of Wildness Before Something Sublime --Leila Chatti Chelsea Krieg's poems are ""sharp, swift, honest,"" tenderly evoking the ultimately wild nature of what it means to care and connect with honesty. Amidst the cold grief of living, the confusion of parenting, and a bleached landscapes of medical diagnoses, Krieg conjures an artfully lucid and sincere menagerie as a way to find grounding and compassion. Nurses pulse blue as poison dart frogs. MRI machines, too, are creatures with mouths, and we, too, have fur. Beast like breast like the care of a mother. We fight but return, and the cardinals are feeding--together. --Emilie Menzel, author of The Girl Who Became a Rabbit --Emilie Menzel In these tenacious and tender poems, Chelsea Krieg navigates the aftermath of childbirth and her partner's cancer diagnosis. The language is forthright and beautiful, but the speaker is often fretful, hyper aware of perils. Krieg deftly taps into and activates the whole emotional spectrum. Some lines thrum with worry, other lines radiate with gratitude, insight. Krieg has been honing these poems for years and it shows. They are marvelously built, alive with imagery that jolts the senses. I'm thankful for these poems and for this poet. --Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine --Eduardo C. Corral The poems in Everything Is Water remind us that life and death hover right next to each other. With grace and a generous attentiveness--to the natural world and to language itself--Krieg weaves her way through both the human and non-human world--a world of mothers and bodies and water and medical corridors and relations between beings--all rooted in place. Craftswoman is a word that comes to mind, when reading these deftly composed pieces. As we enter and exit this collection (and each individual poem, a world itself), we see our own worlds anew--with added richness, depth, and wonder--that are there already, but that Krieg gently attunes our attention to, in these gorgeous poems. While being honest about the deep ambivalence embedded in the human experience, these poems also illustrate the utter devotion we have toward one another. --Carlene Kucharczyk, author of Strange Hymn --Carlene Kucharczyk

Author Information

CHELSEA KRIEG was raised in southeastern Virginia. She received an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Her work may be found in Fairy Tale Review, Writing the Land: Virginia Anthology, Terrain.org, Gulf Coast, New South, The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol. IX: Virginia, and elsewhere. She was runner-up in Hub City's New Southern Voices 2023 Poetry Prize and a finalist for the New South 2021 Poetry Prize. Chelsea lives in Durham, NC and teaches creative writing at North Carolina State University, where she also codirects the MFA Program.

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