Waterbaby
Nikki Wallschlaeger
Reviewed by Elizabeth Muscari
Waterbaby, Nikki Wallschlaeger's third poetry collection, bravely dives head-first into tough waters. The collection navigates subjects like family, Blackness, womanhood, motherhood, and how moments can drown us in grief and loss and challenge us to stay afloat.
Wallschlaeger's poems sing of love and pain, overflowing with an unflinching voice, packed with musicality and varied rhythms and inventive and precise language.
Readers immediately witness this mastery in her opening poem, "Nobody Special," "I'm nobody special, nobody special / waiting for some answers tonight / hoping somebody will hear me out / while the light keeps flickering, flickering" and we continue to hear this voice echo and boom throughout the collection.
Wallschlaeger weaves life with life's source, belting stories of what it means to live as a Black woman and mother in America. These poems detail the hard work of keeping oneself and others anchored to life, and the fears of sinking in the process.
Her poems ooze with the blues. Refrains and verses of sadness are anchored throughout the work. "Blue Flame of July," for example, leaves readers with emotional yet resounding lines like "Can't fix what's beyond repair / baby I know the feeling."
Wallschlaeger argues that to examine these emotions is to sing of them.
Like blues songs, these poems are populated with life: buildings and bathtubs and children and houses and families. These moments lend readers bustling images of the very things that make up ordinary life, and also shed necessary light on some of the world’s most precious members who sustain life and bloodlines.
This collection is one for this moment. It details hardship, identity, grief, and loss, themes we have become familiar with amidst our distanced, chaotic year. However, this collection includes messages of hope, observing the love it takes to believe in change and healing. Wallschlaeger's musical and lyrical depths sing of our world, showing us the poetry that exists everywhere around us.