Meltwater
Claire Wahmanholm
Reviewed by Allison Flory
Poet and world-bender Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater—her third collection, out this month from Milkweed Editions—opens with an unraveling. Inviting the reader into a world beautifully crafted out of biology and memory, Meltwater steps into a liminal landscape where “the starry outlines of men float like bubbles between us and oblivion” and “you are already prey, and everything out here means you harm.” The instinct that ebbs within these poems knows motherhood as hunger, as thirst, as guilt and witness. As ever-shifting as it is ancient, this dystopia looks like me, like my mother, like yours, and it is dangerous. Life holds hands with death here and they both mourn.
How, then, does Wahmanholm manage to craft this insurmountable tragedy, this weight to carry, into life? The same way mothers do—by braiding prose, erasures, and elegies into sacrifice, where sacrifice is always love and sometimes already grief. “The baby / is so sweet that my eyes leak when they brush against her,” she writes and again I see my mother, I see myself as her firstborn and daughter, and I feel the urgency when Wahmanholm confesses “My mind / is a snarl of corners around which death is always / waiting.” I see the sharp edges, and I feel grief for what is still living inside this work.
And so I must say, everything about this collection explodes: the world at war with itself, the body at war with itself, the speaker at war with herself. The multitudes cratered by the explosions crawl into me as I read and begin to exist in this space between the pages. Everything is liminal. Everything is plural. “Everything was a wound that needed to be burned closed but I wanted to bleed out.”
Claire Wahmanholm is a poet of devastating inevitability, of all the living that comes after the apocalypse, and Meltwater is “a vast, organic machine / running like static behind everything.”