Wild Water Child: Poems by Rose Auslander - Tapa blanda

-These poems are formally inventive and emotionally complex. They are furious, yearning. In their address of familial love, they chart new ground--yes, the familiar reflective stance of an adult looking back on the sustained relationships of a long life, but also a generous and frank consideration at how a child's coming out might move a parent into fraught territory. What sings in these poems is their willingness to give a hard look to the self, to dramatize the self in flux. Oh, and frogs, bees, waters roiling in new ways.- -Liz Bradfield, author of Approaching Ice and Once Removed

-'Walk with open hands/through the waves/of shadows that fall off the edge of what you think you know...' This is the poet's imperative; her instructions: 'I hold a book of fire--what else do I have?' Her
animating language--mercurial, elemental, searing in the intensity and boldness of its vision--creates an incandescent, shape-shifting interior landscape, as it seeks to follow a child's bewildering path into the wild 'to join those who practice the art of invisible mending.'- -Eleanor Wilner, author of Tourist in Hell and Otherwise

-...We as readers are taken on a journey where family, the natural world, and the memory of what is lost come together to form a luminous map for how we might survive. The braiding Auslander has done, not just with time and memory but with different registers of language and imagistic worlds is fantastic. This is a voice I've been waiting to hear. There's a maturity to these poems that never once gets in the way of wonder and real revelation. This is a book that welcomes all bodies, that seeks to see every body as a means of interrogating the self. I am grateful for these poems and for this poet.- -Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing

-We need poetry, and we need good poetry, and Rose Auslander is just that. This debut collection, brimming with sounds from the long i of the title to her identical rhymes, gives us a speaker on the edge of something (ponds? balconies? a clue?), and on the edge of each line, trying to speak, but constantly being interrupted by the ghosts. Auslander's radical enjambment mimic this flooding of emotions from her speaker. And the collection itself is a flood--rife with water, mud, and drowning. The poet's landscape is one composed of her inverted elements--her 'house of water' embryonic, her air 'heavy with /words you won't admit, ' her earth 'leaving no fossil record.' Her cyclical return to the elements thread through her elegy, while, in working a poem's sound, Auslander can set explosives on a stanza to intentionally destroy it. For example, in The Art of Invisible Mending, Auslander builds the rhythm of her poem as the gerund and consonance take over, then she allows her syntax to interrupt it: 'I should have known // I couldn't see my child / go. I should have burned off my hair. To send / smoke signals...' Again, the poet's end stops are sharp, her regret apparent, and her enjambment propelling. Indeed, Auslander's sophisticated line and language play constantly forces her reader to do a retake as poems are beautifully crafted, then turned on their heads, such as when her seemingly celebratory language leads to a physical policing in her poem, After So Long. Moving between the epistolary and quickened poems of passion, the aesthetics of this collection are to be long felt after a first reading. It is one you will return to for any number of reasons--loss, craft, language.- -John Bonanni, founding editor of the Cape Cod Poetry Review

"These poems are formally inventive and emotionally complex. They are furious, yearning. In their address of familial love, they chart new ground--yes, the familiar reflective stance of an adult looking back on the sustained relationships of a long life, but also a generous and frank consideration at how a child's coming out might move a parent into fraught territory. What sings in these poems is their willingness to give a hard look to the self, to dramatize the self in flux. Oh, and frogs, bees, waters roiling in new ways." -Liz Bradfield, author of Approaching Ice and Once Removed

"'Walk with open hands/through the waves/of shadows that fall off the edge of what you think you know...' This is the poet's imperative; her instructions: 'I hold a book of fire--what else do I have?' Her
animating language--mercurial, elemental, searing in the intensity and boldness of its vision--creates an incandescent, shape-shifting interior landscape, as it seeks to follow a child's bewildering path into the wild 'to join those who practice the art of invisible mending.'" -Eleanor Wilner, author of Tourist in Hell and Otherwise

..".We as readers are taken on a journey where family, the natural world, and the memory of what is lost come together to form a luminous map for how we might survive. The braiding Auslander has done, not just with time and memory but with different registers of language and imagistic worlds is fantastic. This is a voice I've been waiting to hear. There's a maturity to these poems that never once gets in the way of wonder and real revelation. This is a book that welcomes all bodies, that seeks to see every body as a means of interrogating the self. I am grateful for these poems and for this poet." -Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing

"We need poetry, and we need good poetry, and Rose Auslander is just that. This debut collection, brimming with sounds from the long i of the title to her identical rhymes, gives us a speaker on the edge of something (ponds? balconies? a clue?), and on the edge of each line, trying to speak, but constantly being interrupted by the ghosts. Auslander's radical enjambment mimic this flooding of emotions from her speaker. And the collection itself is a flood--rife with water, mud, and drowning. The poet's landscape is one composed of her inverted elements--her 'house of water' embryonic, her air 'heavy with /words you won't admit, ' her earth 'leaving no fossil record.' Her cyclical return to the elements thread through her elegy, while, in working a poem's sound, Auslander can set explosives on a stanza to intentionally destroy it. For example, in The Art of Invisible Mending, Auslander builds the rhythm of her poem as the gerund and consonance take over, then she allows her syntax to interrupt it: 'I should have known // I couldn't see my child / go. I should have burned off my hair. To send / smoke signals...' Again, the poet's end stops are sharp, her regret apparent, and her enjambment propelling. Indeed, Auslander's sophisticated line and language play constantly forces her reader to do a retake as poems are beautifully crafted, then turned on their heads, such as when her seemingly celebratory language leads to a physical policing in her poem, After So Long. Moving between the epistolary and quickened poems of passion, the aesthetics of this collection are to be long felt after a first reading. It is one you will return to for any number of reasons--loss, craft, language." -John Bonanni, founding editor of the Cape Cod Poetry Review

Wild Water Child is a collection by Hyannis poet Rose Auslander and the second annual publication of Bass River Press, an imprint of the Cultural Center of Cape Cod. The poems are written from the perspective of a mother struggling to understand and accept her child's new way of life and the many dangers that come with it. Characterized by wild, natural imagery and rhythmic flow, Wild Water Child is a journey of longing, heartbreak, and coming to terms. Auslander's poetry is layered and multi-faceted; it demands a second, third, or even fourth read.

Addicted to water and poetry (not necessarily in that order), Rose Auslander earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. Poetry Editor of Folded Word Press and Editor of the unFold zine, she is the author of the chapbooks Folding Water, Hints, and The Dolphin in the Gowanus. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has read her poems on NPR. Rose currently lives on Cape Cod.

Auslander writers, of Wild Water Child:

The summer I began writing these poems, my husband and I had not heard from our younger child for months. Seeking to escape chronic pain in her neck, back, stomach, and hands, our nineteen-year-old had left our home in Brooklyn, New York, to live without shelter with a small group in the woods of upper Wisconsin. She planned to study primitive skills inspired by traditional Ojibwa ways--drinking wild river water, creating fire from friction, telling time and direction from the sky. Had she lost her mind?

Told that the only way to communicate was to write, I sent letter after letter. Did they arrive? I received no word back. The head of her group assured me she was ok, but I worried. I couldn't sleep. My neck, back, and stomach hurt. My hand ached from writing.

When I gave up, a letter arrived--the envelope covered with drawings of trees and rivers and clouds. I could barely see the address.

That October, we visited our child in the woods. I drank my own wild water. Month by month, it infiltrated my system. And after thirty years in Brooklyn, my husband and I left city life, to live by a pond, a short walk from the ocean.

These poems, many originally written as letters, were completed here, on Cape Cod.