Everything Is Water

by Chelsea Krieg

Virginia Winner of The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series

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

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Paperback

Published March 25, 2026

About the author

Chelsea Krieg is a poet, freelance journalist, and educator in North Carolina. Her debut poetry collection, Everything is Water, won the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series (Virginia) and is forthcoming with Texas Review Press in 2026. She holds an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Terrain.org, Fairy Tale Review, New South, Gulf Coast, The Southern Poetry Anthology (Issue IX Virginia), Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Greensboro Review, Poet Lore, and Bellevue Literary Review, among others. She was runner-up for Hub City Press’s 2023 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize and a finalist for the New South 2021 Poetry Contest. Her work won the Ninth Annual Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Competition Award in 2017, and she was a Sally Buckner Emerging Writers’ Fellowship Award Finalist in 2018. She also received a North Carolina State Poetry Contest Honorable Mention in 2015.

Her freelance writing has received nominations for the APEX Award and received an American Society of Business Publication Editors Azbee Award of Excellence in 2022.

Chelsea is the Administrative Director of the MFA Program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC and lives in Durham, NC with her family.

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unsurprisingly, I have read several versions of this book several times. And I can honestly say that these polish, often dense, poems reward repeated readings. I thought I would breeze through this for a GoodReads review, and I couldn’t. Although some of the pieces may center on quotidian topics, this is not casual verse.

The line breaks? Immaculate. The metaphors? Elaborated upon with great attention to detail. The endings? Stunning. The poetic forms? Surprisingly (for today) varied. The fillers? Nonexistent.

These are narrative poems, but they don’t stray into the prosaic. The images may pile up, but each stacked one helps hold up the whole. Seriously, for evidence, check out Owl of Minerva, Chemotherapy, and Before I Knew What it Meant. You’ll understand.

The themes are often heavy, but then we have beauties like Lost Empire, Anytime Firecrackers, and I dreamed your name was River to pick us back up.

I want to say that In Which Daedalus Does Not Build Wings is my favorite, but that title shifted several times throughout this reading. The double-bind of parenting hits hard, and Self-Portrait of Mother as Nature Doc is a flurry of tough punches. The ending of Before I Knew just leaves my jaw hanging.

The book length is well calculated. There is thematic overlap, of course, but there aren’t multiple pieces doing the same thing. We see range, formally and thematically. This collection rewards your attention, and putting it down may feel just as challenging as breathing underwater.

[Kenneth Lota · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poems is wonderful! (Full disclosure: I am friends with the author but honestly would have enjoyed this book just as much even if I did not know her.)

The poems in this collection draw on autobiographical materials from the poet's life (marriage, motherhood, medical crises, etc.), but you don't need to know anything about her life to understand and appreciate what she is doing here. There is a wide variety of poetic styles and devices used across this volume, but it never feels self-conscious or showy. It's simply the work of a talented and versatile poet who keeps finding new nuances of feeling to explore and new ways to portray those nuances. She lets you into her experiences of often very difficult, complex situations in ways that feel enlightening and broaden your understanding of other people. She often within a poem brings everything together into an unexpected effect (not exactly a "twist," but something like that) in the last few lines. This tendency makes each poem feel like a thoroughly thought-out, self-contained experience, even as the poems clearly connect to each other in many ways. The intellectual and emotional work she is accomplishing here could only be done through the medium of poetry, which she has thoroughly mastered.

I truly recommend this book, even if you are not the most prolific poetry reader (as I myself am not - yet). It is worth experiencing what this book is doing. And I am very much looking forward to Chelsea's next book!

[Caleb Horowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each poem is delicately constructed—concise, sure of itself. These poems circle around the whirlpool of motherhood, grief, depression, and love for someone who is ill. the series of poems set in couples counseling are some of my favorites—the mingled grief, anger, and immense love the speaker feels for their partner, the weight of circumstance. The title is fitting—the poems return, as we all do, to the water. But you cannot step into the same river twice.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterful debut that feels like the work of a writer you’ve always known would be there when the time demanded it. Incredible control of line and use of form, these poems perform the alchemy of transmutation, turning the lead of ordinary life into gold—or perhaps the other way around.