A poet I know, Nadia Gerassimenko, asked for early reviews of her new chapbook, at the water’s edge. The review is below, but the short version is, if you enjoy poetry in the least, buy it.

One of the first things to notice about at the water’s edge is the orthography. No capital letters appear in this, except the author’s name and the press information. This smallness carries throughout, recalling the title. What water are we on the edge of? Sometimes, it seems we are at a summertime lake, seeing a girl with her grandfather. At other times, we stand on the bank of a rushing river, not sure whether dolores, a girl who ripples through the book, will jump, and whether she means to swim, to drown, or to hope for rescue.

​The gradations of “freedom comes in gradations” ripple back to the hiding in “dolores confesses” (perhaps the best of the poems, though it’s hard to judge, as none stand in isolation). The poem “at the water’s edge” from which the book takes its title presents us with the water as both a frozen river and as the narrator. The narrator is no longer at the water’s edge: we are, watching her. An act of voyeurism that is both cathartic and helpless. After this poem, the book shifts, with more experimental forms in the pieces that come after.

​Throughout, the ideas of self, mother, and child are ambiguously mixed. Taken in isolation, each of the poems is interesting, though some are vague enough to be better read as sound poems than for meaning. Taken together in the order they’re presented, this chapbook fulfills the promise of its title. We stand at the water’s edge, witnesses to a liminal space of becoming and unbecoming, of being born and giving birth.

​Or, to speak less poetically, more directly—something that happens rarely in the chapbook—I wish I could love the hell out of this chapbook, but I can’t. The hell is indelibly there, and no amount of love can remove it. I wish I could love the hell out of this chapbook, but I’ll settle for loving the book, both hell and high water.