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Drink
DRINK (BlazeVOX) explores the mercurial myths of mermaids, nautical lore of drift bottles, and unmapped beach parties at the Pacific, to questions the changeable stories we tell of water, those connected to plane disappearances, downed ships, lost girls, and forgotten lives. Drink seeks to understand what terrorizes us, be they forgotten messages, murdered sisters, or women living in water.
100 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2015
567 people want to read
About the author
Laura Madeline Wiseman
52 books152 followersLaura Madeline Wiseman's latest books are Velocipede, published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press and Through A Certain Forest published by BlazeVOX [books]. Her collaboratively written chapbook with Andrea Blythe, Every Girl Becomes the Wolf is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
She is also the author of the full length collections of poetry An Apparently Impossible Adventure (BlazeVOX [books], 2016), Drink (BlazeVOX [books], 2015), Wake (Aldrich Press, 2015), Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience (Lavender Ink, 2014), American Galactic (Martian Lit, 2014), Queen of the Platform (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013) and Sprung (San Francisco Bay Press, 2012).
Her collaborative books are People Like Cats with Chuka Susan Chesney, (Red Dashboard, LCC in 2016), Leaves of Absence with artist Sally Deskins (Red Dashboard, LCC, 2016), The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters with artist Lauren Rinaldi (Les Femmes Folles, 2015, and Intimates and Fools (Les Femmes Folles, 2014) with artist Sally Deskins.
Her flash novel is The Bottle Opener (Red Dashboard, LCC 2014).
Her letterpress books are Unclose The Door (Gold Quoin Press, 2012) and Farm Hands (Gold Quoin Press, 2012).
Her chapbooks are Threnody (Porkbelly Press, 2014), Spindrift (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), Stranger Still (Finishing Line Press, 2013, First Wife (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013), Men and Their Whims (Writing Knights Press, 2013), She Who Loves Her Father (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Branding Girls (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Ghost Girl (Pudding House, 2010), and My Imaginary (Dancing Girl Press, 2010). Her early DIY chapbooks include Plastic Matches (2002).
She is also the editor of Bared: Contemporary Poetry and Art on Bras and Breasts (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2017) and Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013).
Her work has appeared in Margie, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, Feminist Studies, Mid-American Review, Blackbird, 13th Moon, Cream City Review, Poet Lore and elsewhere. Awards and grants include the Academy of American Poets Award and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation grant. Currently, she teaches writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
She is also the author of the full length collections of poetry An Apparently Impossible Adventure (BlazeVOX [books], 2016), Drink (BlazeVOX [books], 2015), Wake (Aldrich Press, 2015), Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience (Lavender Ink, 2014), American Galactic (Martian Lit, 2014), Queen of the Platform (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013) and Sprung (San Francisco Bay Press, 2012).
Her collaborative books are People Like Cats with Chuka Susan Chesney, (Red Dashboard, LCC in 2016), Leaves of Absence with artist Sally Deskins (Red Dashboard, LCC, 2016), The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters with artist Lauren Rinaldi (Les Femmes Folles, 2015, and Intimates and Fools (Les Femmes Folles, 2014) with artist Sally Deskins.
Her flash novel is The Bottle Opener (Red Dashboard, LCC 2014).
Her letterpress books are Unclose The Door (Gold Quoin Press, 2012) and Farm Hands (Gold Quoin Press, 2012).
Her chapbooks are Threnody (Porkbelly Press, 2014), Spindrift (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), Stranger Still (Finishing Line Press, 2013, First Wife (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013), Men and Their Whims (Writing Knights Press, 2013), She Who Loves Her Father (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Branding Girls (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Ghost Girl (Pudding House, 2010), and My Imaginary (Dancing Girl Press, 2010). Her early DIY chapbooks include Plastic Matches (2002).
She is also the editor of Bared: Contemporary Poetry and Art on Bras and Breasts (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2017) and Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013).
Her work has appeared in Margie, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, Feminist Studies, Mid-American Review, Blackbird, 13th Moon, Cream City Review, Poet Lore and elsewhere. Awards and grants include the Academy of American Poets Award and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation grant. Currently, she teaches writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 10, 2016
Really quite lovely, although it's painful reading in parts. It's part meditation on mermaids, part exploration of the consequences of alcoholism, and each of the sections informs the other. A study in symbols, essentially, and of the things that bind them together.
I recently read another of Wiseman's books ("Wake") and in a way I wish I'd read this one first, as gives background to the other; explains it a little more I think.
I recently read another of Wiseman's books ("Wake") and in a way I wish I'd read this one first, as gives background to the other; explains it a little more I think.
June 26, 2018
I devoured this book of poetry in one setting. I probably shouldn't have, but I couldn't stop myself. It was horrifically sad. It read more like a story, which let me get into it easier, since I don't enjoy reading poetry. The book kept a heavy cloud on my heart and throat as I read it. It wasn't for me, but it would probably be better in the hands of a poet.
July 17, 2016
A Book Review of Laura Madeline Wiseman’s DRINK (BlazeVOX [Books] 2015)
by Dennis Etzel, Jr.
Fairy tales come from dark places within cultures, passed down from generation to generation, retold and revised, and functions to help an audience to cope with tragedy and humanity’s dark sides. Laura Madeline Wiseman wonderfully refreshes the fairy tale’s function in her new collection of poems titled Drink. “Drink” not only operates as verb and noun, but, alongside mermaids as we enter the underwater world of DRINK, we recognize how, as children, we grasp onto our own stories-in-the-makings to not just make sense of it, but to survive.
This collection of mixed prose poems with free-verse lyrical styles reveals and affirms all of the tragedies that occur around alcoholism, around being a girl and growing into womanhood in a Patriarchal culture, around sexual assault, any parent’s abuse, and what the power of sisterhood can bring up to the surface for breath. There are bottles, messages, messages in bottles, and seawrecks—those caused by male “sailors” and those caused by family. Her writing exposes what many of us have suffered in our own families: addiction, childhood sexual assault, parental neglect and abuse, and those disintegrations of family as an aftermath.
The first poem “Disaster” serves as an envoi to Drink, associating things being lost with drinking, and how alcohol abuse will become a theme throughout the poems. We first meet a sister, as sisterhood also plays a part in the collection, and find tension in the first sentence of this prose poem: “It’s possible to lose keys or to set the phone in one room and beg a sister to call you so you can follow the noise to where it fell into the nest of bottles behind your desk.” A bird, that timeless figure of poetry, also makes an appearance: “A bird can be lost, smashed into the windows behind the feeders and if not lost, stunned by a disabused belief of more places to fly.” With all of these lost things, we see the surrender of the speaker to alcohol: “Why not lose something small to the drink, like a plane to water?”
As fairy tale mermaids are the guiding motif in this examination of girl grown to woman, these poems are also examinations of fairytales brought by society. Mermaids are what can help recover the lost:
They follow the lost as their planes sink. They drag bodies to shore. They scribble wishes, promises, and prayers in sand. The mermaids paint their lips with crushed anemones, their eyes with the inky night of squids. Their midriffs sparkle with the algae that glow in the dark. They are mythical and mercurial. They change with the stories that change us, twining like dancers, like silver schools of fish, they come in as the tide rises. (“First Story”)
These “mercurial” mermaids, switching volatile moods also aid in the reader’s understanding of stories. Mercurial’s etymology of relating to the messenger god Mercury is no mistake in this poem. Mermaids are bringing the messages, the ones we do not often hear and the ones some do not want to hear.
These mermaids also challenge those cultural gender roles which create the disbelief: “Newsmen in suits tap blank papers, swipe empty hands across desks. Newswomen wear long snug skirts, coral hued blouses, makeup done as if startled, say, I’m going to wish them well, offer a toast, a drink” (“On Vanishing”). Gender roles can be destructive, and the mermaids carry this message, too, in the poem “Water Wars”:
The mermaids are concerned about the female body, their breasts, the uteri. What does a mere maid do about gender roles, hunger, the dark blues? It’s everywhere. The mermaids breathe it. . . . No babies arrive with white cardboard signs from the city hospital to tape to apartment windows and tie to the railing of apartment porches, It’s a pink! It’s a blue!
Wiseman’s poems show us we are survivors of this cultural war within a binary system.
Also, the mermaids are remain after a childhood spent surviving. Moving into the teen years in a poem ironically titled “The Best Years of Your Life,” the mermaids are there in high school during gym, when everyone is in the pool—one of the worst experiences for dealing with self-value and worth. Mermaids know how to protect themselves, even as the speaker cannot: “They refuse the banter—skinny white bitch—drug-party talk, the easy way light halos unmarred flesh.” Readers also see the continued destruction of the viciousness of those teen years: “The mermaids drink the potion from the bottles. Or is it poison? Or is it just alcohol? Were the bottles covered in bumps? Can someone please tell them what raised bumps mean? (“Why They Leave the Ocean”).
In the middrift of the book’s chronology is the switch to California, the speaker’s sisters, alcohol, and an overpowering mother’s negligence and abuse, as the mother “never looked at a map, / we never asked where we were going” (“Four Walls”). As the mother moves her family from one place to another, the reader faces the painful dilemma of the mother’s own surviving abuse, as well as the temporary living situation: “. . . She made us / a bedroom by tacking sheets to the ceiling.” In the poem “Welfare Queen,” Wiseman shows how the mother, also, is abusive: “searching our bedrooms, diaries, and notes, baiting us / with accusations on fucking, whose dick we sucked, / where we really were.”
As a trigger warning here for survivors of sexual abuse, Wiseman’s poetry confronts the issue of childhood molestation and its consequences with both courage and empowerment. We co-witness those men, in “Pariahs,” who “wanted to feed us hot apple slices // from their fork, or who rubbed our thighs inside / our Disney sleeping bags until we awoke, or who slid // their hands into our underwear, we grew teeth, / sharp and mangle-mouthed, beyond the help of braces.” The imagery evokes terror, the loss of control with these attacks:
We didn’t know why we were woken—a door
slamming into our bed, a jarring, someone
in our room—the reason the bed moved,
a vibration cue that someone was there, again.
Our sister says she climbed on top of one of us
to use her hands. No one could move
in the shadows. We pleaded
for her to stop, but she couldn’t.
(“Night Madness”)
The father and his abuse makes a brief appearance, as many fathers do, in “Child support”: “food stamps: title nineteen: Whores / just like your mother: you even drink like your old man.” However, the collection transitions to focus on how the mother’s abuse leads to burning a sister’s diary and ignoring a sister’s attempted suicide. This is where the mythos of mermaids comes in full revelation—leading to drinking to cope with the tragedy:
We’re quite sure she doesn’t understand the words
written on the wall in permanent black marker,
though she may have read them aloud a few times
as she cupped her mug of coffee, a dog in the hall
watching this, who trails her from the room
to the kitchen to make toast, finish the coffee,
dress for painting. . . .
The first coat fans out wet and slick. She paints
over each word in our sister’s suicide note.
(“Aubade”)
With drinking, shipwreck, and memories come messages in bottles, within bottles themselves—these poems.
The book ends with a series of poems describing the recovery and survival after it all. “On Privacy” is the last poem, that poem of a chance at freedom after a destructive life, where, “Most may have something, a bright light, a hope, something small enough to fit in a hand, slide into a pocket, a gentle warmth and weight to feel against the flesh as they take off down their country’s beach at a steady run.”
One of the calls of Women’s Studies is to examine of where women have been and are silenced, and break the spell to bring voices back and up front. Where the speaker could not speak in these poems, the mermaids swim in to serve as a voice. Ultimately, Wiseman’s power is in taking us through these murky waters, empowering survivors in her work. This collection of “mermaid lore” serves to uncover, re-cover, act recovering, discover—to find what was lost and claim what is real—a chance for the freedom from addiction and abuse. This is a new kind of “Diving into the Wreckage” via Adrienne Rich, how feminism is still relative and needed in these Patriarchal, destructive times.
by Dennis Etzel, Jr.
Fairy tales come from dark places within cultures, passed down from generation to generation, retold and revised, and functions to help an audience to cope with tragedy and humanity’s dark sides. Laura Madeline Wiseman wonderfully refreshes the fairy tale’s function in her new collection of poems titled Drink. “Drink” not only operates as verb and noun, but, alongside mermaids as we enter the underwater world of DRINK, we recognize how, as children, we grasp onto our own stories-in-the-makings to not just make sense of it, but to survive.
This collection of mixed prose poems with free-verse lyrical styles reveals and affirms all of the tragedies that occur around alcoholism, around being a girl and growing into womanhood in a Patriarchal culture, around sexual assault, any parent’s abuse, and what the power of sisterhood can bring up to the surface for breath. There are bottles, messages, messages in bottles, and seawrecks—those caused by male “sailors” and those caused by family. Her writing exposes what many of us have suffered in our own families: addiction, childhood sexual assault, parental neglect and abuse, and those disintegrations of family as an aftermath.
The first poem “Disaster” serves as an envoi to Drink, associating things being lost with drinking, and how alcohol abuse will become a theme throughout the poems. We first meet a sister, as sisterhood also plays a part in the collection, and find tension in the first sentence of this prose poem: “It’s possible to lose keys or to set the phone in one room and beg a sister to call you so you can follow the noise to where it fell into the nest of bottles behind your desk.” A bird, that timeless figure of poetry, also makes an appearance: “A bird can be lost, smashed into the windows behind the feeders and if not lost, stunned by a disabused belief of more places to fly.” With all of these lost things, we see the surrender of the speaker to alcohol: “Why not lose something small to the drink, like a plane to water?”
As fairy tale mermaids are the guiding motif in this examination of girl grown to woman, these poems are also examinations of fairytales brought by society. Mermaids are what can help recover the lost:
They follow the lost as their planes sink. They drag bodies to shore. They scribble wishes, promises, and prayers in sand. The mermaids paint their lips with crushed anemones, their eyes with the inky night of squids. Their midriffs sparkle with the algae that glow in the dark. They are mythical and mercurial. They change with the stories that change us, twining like dancers, like silver schools of fish, they come in as the tide rises. (“First Story”)
These “mercurial” mermaids, switching volatile moods also aid in the reader’s understanding of stories. Mercurial’s etymology of relating to the messenger god Mercury is no mistake in this poem. Mermaids are bringing the messages, the ones we do not often hear and the ones some do not want to hear.
These mermaids also challenge those cultural gender roles which create the disbelief: “Newsmen in suits tap blank papers, swipe empty hands across desks. Newswomen wear long snug skirts, coral hued blouses, makeup done as if startled, say, I’m going to wish them well, offer a toast, a drink” (“On Vanishing”). Gender roles can be destructive, and the mermaids carry this message, too, in the poem “Water Wars”:
The mermaids are concerned about the female body, their breasts, the uteri. What does a mere maid do about gender roles, hunger, the dark blues? It’s everywhere. The mermaids breathe it. . . . No babies arrive with white cardboard signs from the city hospital to tape to apartment windows and tie to the railing of apartment porches, It’s a pink! It’s a blue!
Wiseman’s poems show us we are survivors of this cultural war within a binary system.
Also, the mermaids are remain after a childhood spent surviving. Moving into the teen years in a poem ironically titled “The Best Years of Your Life,” the mermaids are there in high school during gym, when everyone is in the pool—one of the worst experiences for dealing with self-value and worth. Mermaids know how to protect themselves, even as the speaker cannot: “They refuse the banter—skinny white bitch—drug-party talk, the easy way light halos unmarred flesh.” Readers also see the continued destruction of the viciousness of those teen years: “The mermaids drink the potion from the bottles. Or is it poison? Or is it just alcohol? Were the bottles covered in bumps? Can someone please tell them what raised bumps mean? (“Why They Leave the Ocean”).
In the middrift of the book’s chronology is the switch to California, the speaker’s sisters, alcohol, and an overpowering mother’s negligence and abuse, as the mother “never looked at a map, / we never asked where we were going” (“Four Walls”). As the mother moves her family from one place to another, the reader faces the painful dilemma of the mother’s own surviving abuse, as well as the temporary living situation: “. . . She made us / a bedroom by tacking sheets to the ceiling.” In the poem “Welfare Queen,” Wiseman shows how the mother, also, is abusive: “searching our bedrooms, diaries, and notes, baiting us / with accusations on fucking, whose dick we sucked, / where we really were.”
As a trigger warning here for survivors of sexual abuse, Wiseman’s poetry confronts the issue of childhood molestation and its consequences with both courage and empowerment. We co-witness those men, in “Pariahs,” who “wanted to feed us hot apple slices // from their fork, or who rubbed our thighs inside / our Disney sleeping bags until we awoke, or who slid // their hands into our underwear, we grew teeth, / sharp and mangle-mouthed, beyond the help of braces.” The imagery evokes terror, the loss of control with these attacks:
We didn’t know why we were woken—a door
slamming into our bed, a jarring, someone
in our room—the reason the bed moved,
a vibration cue that someone was there, again.
Our sister says she climbed on top of one of us
to use her hands. No one could move
in the shadows. We pleaded
for her to stop, but she couldn’t.
(“Night Madness”)
The father and his abuse makes a brief appearance, as many fathers do, in “Child support”: “food stamps: title nineteen: Whores / just like your mother: you even drink like your old man.” However, the collection transitions to focus on how the mother’s abuse leads to burning a sister’s diary and ignoring a sister’s attempted suicide. This is where the mythos of mermaids comes in full revelation—leading to drinking to cope with the tragedy:
We’re quite sure she doesn’t understand the words
written on the wall in permanent black marker,
though she may have read them aloud a few times
as she cupped her mug of coffee, a dog in the hall
watching this, who trails her from the room
to the kitchen to make toast, finish the coffee,
dress for painting. . . .
The first coat fans out wet and slick. She paints
over each word in our sister’s suicide note.
(“Aubade”)
With drinking, shipwreck, and memories come messages in bottles, within bottles themselves—these poems.
The book ends with a series of poems describing the recovery and survival after it all. “On Privacy” is the last poem, that poem of a chance at freedom after a destructive life, where, “Most may have something, a bright light, a hope, something small enough to fit in a hand, slide into a pocket, a gentle warmth and weight to feel against the flesh as they take off down their country’s beach at a steady run.”
One of the calls of Women’s Studies is to examine of where women have been and are silenced, and break the spell to bring voices back and up front. Where the speaker could not speak in these poems, the mermaids swim in to serve as a voice. Ultimately, Wiseman’s power is in taking us through these murky waters, empowering survivors in her work. This collection of “mermaid lore” serves to uncover, re-cover, act recovering, discover—to find what was lost and claim what is real—a chance for the freedom from addiction and abuse. This is a new kind of “Diving into the Wreckage” via Adrienne Rich, how feminism is still relative and needed in these Patriarchal, destructive times.
October 20, 2018
Excellent book!!!
February 15, 2015
DRINK (BlazeVOX) explores the mercurial myths of mermaids, nautical lore of drift bottles, and unmapped beach parties at the Pacific, to questions the changeable stories we tell of water, those connected to plane disappearances, downed ships, lost girls, and forgotten lives. Drink seeks to understand what terrorizes us, be they forgotten messages, murdered sisters, or women living in water.
Witty, sad, tragic, and magical, the poems in Drink both rewrite myths of the sea and present a harrowing vision of a childhood fraught with abuse, alcoholism, and poverty. The result is a collection of poems that shimmer with revelatory beauty, longing, and honesty. Clearly Wiseman is one of the more unique and inspired new voices on the American poetry scene today.
– Nin Andrews
In her beautiful new collection, Drink, Laura Madeline Wiseman guides us to the bottom of the ocean, where mermaids collect stones among crashed planes and sunken ships. As the book progresses, bottles and bodies become vessels for the persistent memory of trauma. In poems that converse with everything from Homer’s Odyssey to Peter Pan, Wiseman stunningly depicts the instability of home, navigating issues of poverty, gendered violence, and “manmade” disasters in strikingly intimate lines that throw us headfirst into the high school gym pool with her mermaids. “Note how the roads refuse the grid,” Wiseman writes. “Note how the ocean is taking back the coast. Note how every path ends in drink.” Wiseman’s raw and elegant Drink plunges the depths of the ocean, of love, and of memory to search the wreckage of all that is lost, and the life that brims beneath it. “The problem with memory is fact,” Wiseman reminds us, but through these poems, we can search “for some other place, some magic code to save us.”
– Alyse Knorr
Marcel had his madeleine; Laura Madeline Wiseman, her mermaids. A child’s toy, a tattoo on an ankle, and the past floods back like messages in bottles: a devastating childhood told with honesty and clear-eyed bravery. I am reminded how poetry can save us, how, in the hands of such a talented writer as Wiseman, it can raise us from the depths to a cove of still water where, perhaps, who knows, the mermaids are.
– Alice Friman
Wiseman deftly handles both free verse and prose poems in this engaging collection. She weaves together a tight fabric of related motifs—drinking and a bottle collection, writing and tattoos, mermaids and human sisters, a negligent mother and unreliable men. Her gaze goes wide as she covers history and myth. Then she zooms in on family and a personal love story. Contraries abound in this richly complex and memorable tapestry of poems.
– Diane Lockward
There are mermaids in our midst. They couple with sailors. They regard great cities from their floating vantage points in the water. They are “concerned about the female body.” And through their eyes, we rediscover our own losses, how we’ve been damaged, how anxious we are for myths and other narratives, so that our lives won’t seem “written in water, already gone.” Part fairytale, part intimate meditation on a California girlhood, Laura Madeline Wiseman’s Drink transforms messages into massages; language is made physical, a letter stoppered in a bottle, insisting—despite every storm and shipwreck—in the possibility of speech.
– Jehanne Dubrow
Witty, sad, tragic, and magical, the poems in Drink both rewrite myths of the sea and present a harrowing vision of a childhood fraught with abuse, alcoholism, and poverty. The result is a collection of poems that shimmer with revelatory beauty, longing, and honesty. Clearly Wiseman is one of the more unique and inspired new voices on the American poetry scene today.
– Nin Andrews
In her beautiful new collection, Drink, Laura Madeline Wiseman guides us to the bottom of the ocean, where mermaids collect stones among crashed planes and sunken ships. As the book progresses, bottles and bodies become vessels for the persistent memory of trauma. In poems that converse with everything from Homer’s Odyssey to Peter Pan, Wiseman stunningly depicts the instability of home, navigating issues of poverty, gendered violence, and “manmade” disasters in strikingly intimate lines that throw us headfirst into the high school gym pool with her mermaids. “Note how the roads refuse the grid,” Wiseman writes. “Note how the ocean is taking back the coast. Note how every path ends in drink.” Wiseman’s raw and elegant Drink plunges the depths of the ocean, of love, and of memory to search the wreckage of all that is lost, and the life that brims beneath it. “The problem with memory is fact,” Wiseman reminds us, but through these poems, we can search “for some other place, some magic code to save us.”
– Alyse Knorr
Marcel had his madeleine; Laura Madeline Wiseman, her mermaids. A child’s toy, a tattoo on an ankle, and the past floods back like messages in bottles: a devastating childhood told with honesty and clear-eyed bravery. I am reminded how poetry can save us, how, in the hands of such a talented writer as Wiseman, it can raise us from the depths to a cove of still water where, perhaps, who knows, the mermaids are.
– Alice Friman
Wiseman deftly handles both free verse and prose poems in this engaging collection. She weaves together a tight fabric of related motifs—drinking and a bottle collection, writing and tattoos, mermaids and human sisters, a negligent mother and unreliable men. Her gaze goes wide as she covers history and myth. Then she zooms in on family and a personal love story. Contraries abound in this richly complex and memorable tapestry of poems.
– Diane Lockward
There are mermaids in our midst. They couple with sailors. They regard great cities from their floating vantage points in the water. They are “concerned about the female body.” And through their eyes, we rediscover our own losses, how we’ve been damaged, how anxious we are for myths and other narratives, so that our lives won’t seem “written in water, already gone.” Part fairytale, part intimate meditation on a California girlhood, Laura Madeline Wiseman’s Drink transforms messages into massages; language is made physical, a letter stoppered in a bottle, insisting—despite every storm and shipwreck—in the possibility of speech.
– Jehanne Dubrow
September 1, 2015
As half-women, the mythical mermaids that swim and roll through the first third of Laura Madeline Wiseman’s Drink, call up the murky waters of teenage life. They are young women straddling two worlds, caught in the dreamy underwater quality of youth while looking forward to womanhood. The mermaids are “mercurial,” always on the verge of transformation in the same way teenagers exist in a constant state of flux, almost daily changing into new versions of themselves. They “change with the stories that change us” (“First Story”) and are capable of “unzipping the long, silky skirt of their tail” to step out into womanhood only to return to their tail and the sea (“The Switch”)....
Read the rest of my review of Drink at the Rhizomatic Ideas blog run by Zoetic Press.
I have also published an interview with Wiseman on mermaids, myth, and creative community.
Read the rest of my review of Drink at the Rhizomatic Ideas blog run by Zoetic Press.
I have also published an interview with Wiseman on mermaids, myth, and creative community.
February 4, 2016
I received this book, as an Advance Readers Copy, and devoured it in one sitting.
It was raw, reaching and real.
The scope of the book, dealing with plane crashes, mermaids,
drinking, bottle collections, relationships,
a horrible childhood and suicide
all were put together in a read that totally grabbed me and made me want more.
I totally recommend this amazing book, Drink.
It was raw, reaching and real.
The scope of the book, dealing with plane crashes, mermaids,
drinking, bottle collections, relationships,
a horrible childhood and suicide
all were put together in a read that totally grabbed me and made me want more.
I totally recommend this amazing book, Drink.
January 17, 2016
Everything water, taken from seascapes, this washed through me with deep imagery, and sustenance. Not a fan of Mermaids per se, but this talented, wise poet turns me on to them and their mighty forces as I never thought I would ever be. Stunning work.
June 3, 2015
amazing.stunning, just wonderfully done.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews