What do you think?
Rate this book
In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful
A poetic re-visioning of narratives of violence against women and nature
In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful is a meditation on water, land, women, and violent environmental changes as they affect both the natural world and human migration. The poet reckons with the unsettling realities that women experience, questioning the cause and effect of events and asking why stories of oppression are so often simply accepted as the only stories. Alutiiq language is used throughout these poems that are in conversation with history, ancestors, and an uncertain future, in imagery that moves in waves, returning again and again to the ocean, and a deep visioning of the "current."
Excerpt from IN THE FIELD
They asked me if I was a citizen.
They wanted to know what I had seen/
I had heard/
this was only a
Look at the mark and tell them what you see.
[...]
In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful is a meditation on water, land, women, and violent environmental changes as they affect both the natural world and human migration. The poet reckons with the unsettling realities that women experience, questioning the cause and effect of events and asking why stories of oppression are so often simply accepted as the only stories. Alutiiq language is used throughout these poems that are in conversation with history, ancestors, and an uncertain future, in imagery that moves in waves, returning again and again to the ocean, and a deep visioning of the "current."
Excerpt from IN THE FIELD
They asked me if I was a citizen.
They wanted to know what I had seen/
I had heard/
this was only a
Look at the mark and tell them what you see.
[...]
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2022
2 people are currently reading
60 people want to read
About the author
Abigail Chabitnoy
3 books8 followersABIGAIL CHABITNOY holds a BA in Anthropology and English from Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. She was a Colorado State University Crow-Tremblay Fellow, a 2016 inaugural Peripheral Poets Fellow, and a recipient of the John Clark Pratt Citizenship Award from Colorado State University. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Red Ink, Nat Brut, Tin House, Gulf Coast, and others. Of Germanic and Aleut descent, she is a Koniag descendant and member of Tangirnaq Native Village, and grew up in Pennsylvania.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 8, 2023
i don’t know how to read or review poetry
April 16, 2023
"Imagine what it might be like / when the waters come / to be a fish / to be twelve strong, to be six, two hundred, or forty / sharks swimming toward you—," the last lines of the poem "Anatomy of a Wave," emblematic of the powerful and beautiful reckoning Chabitnoy's latest collection brings to bear. A reckoning with the disappearance and/or abuse of especially Indigenous girls and women, paired with rising sea levels due to climate change. The title's words—wave, beautiful, drowning, current—are keywords throughout the collection, shifting meaning and function in front of the reader's eyes. They transform and are transformed, act and are acted upon. The poems' language is fragmentary. Their format lets the empty space speak for the lagunae left by the women disappeared not only from the lives around them but erased by historiographers and/or from the news. These poems are a memorial in the way a ravaged environment is a memorial, but a memorial come to life and rising.
April 23, 2024
Because the poetry seems to rise up out of the earth, or to show the poet in process of sinking further into the earth, or acquainting herself with the earth, it’s helpful to imagine situations where sense emerges from the earth. Like think of water and ocean, which the book thinks about. Especially the waves. And the energy that would be implicit to waves as they rise, as they’re sustained within the water, as they swell even further. This is what the poems feel like. Or they feel like the poet accepting that energy, and giving that energy back to the earth. And the poems are record and articulation of how that energy passed through her.
It is a cycle mythos in Chabitnoy’s book. Place a mythic landscape in proximity to the poet. An idea of place that she yearns for—a place that would afford absolute immersion. But do the poems tell a story of her immersion? I’m not sure. The poems feel removed from the myth, like they’re relating the poet’s connection to something outside herself, told in charged fragments. And I’m often wondering about how the poetic fragment is intended. Should it be read as shard of experience—something the poet has been allowed to handle, then put back down? Or is it an overflow of experience the poet can only relate in charged fragments, because it was experienced by her as a sequence of moments? These questions matter, because, as a reader, I don’t feel I’ve been given full access to subject or the poet’s sentiment about that subject. And I wonder, then, how the poet is using insularity in her work.
It’s a lot like the presentation of her native language. It reads into the poem, as in, the poem’s English leads directly into the Alutliq moments. And for an English speaker like myself, these fragments remove me from the continuous reading. However, the footnotes that translate these moments in the poem read like lyric poems. Each line of Alutliq might be individually footnoted, but, for the poet, they collectively converge into a lyric poem. This, for me, speaks to the relationship between poet and mythic landscape. She is distant. But she is also threading the fragments into a lyrically constellated understanding.
With that understanding occupying a number of positions. The site of genocide, and what to do with that knowledge, and its connection to her own past. But especially men’s attitudes towards women, and what women should be doing collectively to account for that. Or, more complexly, the book makes a statement about presence, the particular presence of water, which is there, but also something that is hard to mark its there-ness. And men have been trying to account for this insubstantiality for many years. With their ambivalence, and a number of other dismissive gestures. And what does it say if the women are of the water, or in the water, or related in some way to water?
It is a cycle mythos in Chabitnoy’s book. Place a mythic landscape in proximity to the poet. An idea of place that she yearns for—a place that would afford absolute immersion. But do the poems tell a story of her immersion? I’m not sure. The poems feel removed from the myth, like they’re relating the poet’s connection to something outside herself, told in charged fragments. And I’m often wondering about how the poetic fragment is intended. Should it be read as shard of experience—something the poet has been allowed to handle, then put back down? Or is it an overflow of experience the poet can only relate in charged fragments, because it was experienced by her as a sequence of moments? These questions matter, because, as a reader, I don’t feel I’ve been given full access to subject or the poet’s sentiment about that subject. And I wonder, then, how the poet is using insularity in her work.
It’s a lot like the presentation of her native language. It reads into the poem, as in, the poem’s English leads directly into the Alutliq moments. And for an English speaker like myself, these fragments remove me from the continuous reading. However, the footnotes that translate these moments in the poem read like lyric poems. Each line of Alutliq might be individually footnoted, but, for the poet, they collectively converge into a lyric poem. This, for me, speaks to the relationship between poet and mythic landscape. She is distant. But she is also threading the fragments into a lyrically constellated understanding.
With that understanding occupying a number of positions. The site of genocide, and what to do with that knowledge, and its connection to her own past. But especially men’s attitudes towards women, and what women should be doing collectively to account for that. Or, more complexly, the book makes a statement about presence, the particular presence of water, which is there, but also something that is hard to mark its there-ness. And men have been trying to account for this insubstantiality for many years. With their ambivalence, and a number of other dismissive gestures. And what does it say if the women are of the water, or in the water, or related in some way to water?
January 5, 2023
"Still we are burying women with their mouths closed.
Still we are buying women with our mouths closed.
Still we are missing."
A beautiful and eloquent book filled with poetry using both English and the Alutiiq language. This makes for flowing poems that play with structure, sound, and footnotes. Using imagery of waves and teeth, Chabitnoy creates stunning and breath-taking pieces discussing missing women, land sovereignty, and other meaningful topics in Indigenous communities.
Still we are buying women with our mouths closed.
Still we are missing."
A beautiful and eloquent book filled with poetry using both English and the Alutiiq language. This makes for flowing poems that play with structure, sound, and footnotes. Using imagery of waves and teeth, Chabitnoy creates stunning and breath-taking pieces discussing missing women, land sovereignty, and other meaningful topics in Indigenous communities.
Read
August 22, 2025Okay, I don't always write reviews (even if the book I'm reading is amazing), but I just have to say that this is another collection that floored me. Beautiful writing about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls using water and teeth and birds and skin and fire and all sort of symbolism to talk about living in a world with so much targeted violence.
March 13, 2023
3 1/4 stars
December 30, 2023
got me out of my reading slump she’s actually such a masterful writer it’s crazy
November 11, 2024
This is a weighty and necessary poetry collection. If only everyone would read this and books like it...
January 20, 2025
In the [present] Where [reading] is
Arresting
Profound
Heartbreaking
Hopeful
Consuming
Beautiful
Arresting
Profound
Heartbreaking
Hopeful
Consuming
Beautiful
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews