Overview

Where the Waters Know My Name is a lyric chapbook about survival, recognition, and the slow work of becoming inhabitable to oneself. Moving through five elemental sections-pressure, suspension, drift, attunement, and interval-these poems trace a life shaped by accumulation: of harm and tenderness, silence and sound, loss and return. Water serves as both metaphor and method. It erodes, carries, reflects, and remembers. Across the collection, the body emerges as a site of both rupture and intelligence-one that learns, often wordlessly, how to endure and how to rest. The poems speak from within lived experience rather than about it, favoring image over declaration, atmosphere over argument. Trauma is present, but never sensationalized; healing appears not as resolution, but as continuity. The early poems navigate coercion, dissociation, and the thinning of self that follows repeated extraction. Later sections turn toward reciprocity, quiet companionship, and attunement-moments where presence replaces vigilance, and trust is rebuilt not through spectacle but through patience. Silence is not emptiness here, but a medium; stillness is not stasis, but consent. Written in spare, luminous language, Where the Waters Know My Name engages themes of identity, embodiment, gendered experience, and recovery without relying on confessional excess. Its voice is intimate yet archetypal, grounded in elemental imagery-rain, current, stone, breath-allowing personal history to resonate as shared terrain. This collection will resonate with readers of contemporary lyric poetry who are drawn to work that listens closely: to the body, to memory, to the quiet thresholds where change begins. It is a book for those who have lived through fracture and are learning, gently and deliberately, how to remain.

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Vanna DiCatania is a writer, engineer, and systems thinker whose work explores memory, survival, and the quiet forces that shape identity over time. Her writing moves through elemental metaphors-water, pressure, accumulation-favoring what is felt and endured over what is declared. She is interested in how bodies learn, how silence carries meaning, and how people rebuild a sense of self after long periods of fracture or erasure.Her poetry resists spectacle in favor of attention. Rather than resolution, her work centers continuity: the slow return of breath, trust, and inhabitation. Themes of embodiment, gendered experience, dissociation, and recovery appear throughout her writing, approached with restraint and clarity rather than confession. The personal is present, but transmuted into archetypal imagery that invites recognition rather than explanation.DiCatania's background as a software engineer informs her literary practice. She approaches both systems and language with the same discipline-listening for structure, identifying failure points, and allowing complexity to remain intact without unnecessary decoration. This dual practice shapes her distinctive voice: precise, spacious, and attentive to what happens between states rather than at their extremes.She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where rain, forests, and long quiet days influence both her creative and technical work. The landscape's rhythms-tides, mist, stillness-are recurring presences in her writing, not as scenery but as collaborators.Where the Waters Know My Name is her first published poetry collection. It reflects a sustained engagement with survival not as triumph, but as presence: the act of staying, listening, and becoming legible to oneself over time. Caroline Poe lives and works in the Pacific Northwest, where the region's shifting light, rain-soaked forests, and long seasons of quiet strongly influence her aesthetic. The environment's cycles of obscuring and revealing mirror her interest in how people come to know themselves and each other over time.Poe created the cover artwork for Where the Waters Know My Name, contributing a visual counterpart to the book's elemental and embodied concerns. Her work complements the collection's themes of survival, recognition, and inhabitation, offering an image that does not illustrate the poems, but resonates with them.

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