Meltwater: Poems

(Paperback)

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A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.

Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen. Part requiem, part bedtime story, Meltwater narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it. Prose poems melt into erasures, erasures swell into lush catalogs. Within this formal ebb and flow, Claire Wahmanholm explores both abundance and annihilation, giving shape and music to our shared human anxieties. What does it mean to bring children into a world like this one A world where grenades are the only kind of fruit we can still name Where lightning can strike over / and over without boredom or belief and nothing / is saved Where losses, both ecological and personal, proliferate endlessly

Here, a parents joy is accompanied by the gnaw of remorse. And yet, Wahmanholm recognizes, children bind us to the worldto its missiles and marvels, to the possibility that there is indeed grace worth suffer[ing] the empty universe for.

If we are going to worry, let us also at least wonder. If we are going to be seized by terror, let us also be seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it. A glittering, kinetic testament to vanishingof biodiversity, of climate stability, of a sense of safetyMeltwater is both vindication and balm.

Reviews

Praise for Meltwater

Meltwater feels necessary and urgent. And comforting Art that surveys the atmospheric wreckage of the Anthropocene might be the only way to soothe the existential dread that accompanies this fast-warming planets forecastRacket
Despite the inherent sorrow that accompanies our necropastoral landscape, this collection nevertheless remains tender and beautiful as it ruminates on ongoing loss.Marissa Ahmadkhan,West Review

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.Allison Flory, Arkansas International

Wahmanholm most certainly writes the body and land electricand I am charged, crackling, and grateful for these stunning poems.Meltwatermakes a wholly original music of land, loss, and motherhood. A must for anyone wanting to read the hard beauty and fragility of the environment anew.Aimee Nezhukumatathil

When we call a poet visionary, we usually mean that the poet in question shows us impalpable abstractions in realms far removed from our own. But Claire Wahmanholm is a visionary of the concrete, the stippled and slippery textures of the precarious present, and the unthinkably imminent. The patterns she reveals to us are the fractal geometries of fear as our surroundings, our loves, and our very selves are pulled into the spiraling inevitabilities of ecological collapse. These poems are devastating, even in their heartrending tenderness. Wahmanholm is a poet of singular and essential power.Monica Youn

In Claire WahmanholmsMeltwater,the world meansentanglement. In these poems, things pour through one another; eventhinkingspour through one another, via the melting form of the erasure.There is no outside to the books ecology,and nothing to be considered in isolation: alphabets and glaciers; human love and human loss, human folly and human violence; animal continuity and species devastation; hairdryers and zygotes. We are inescapably permeated by the everything thatisus: water, ice; land; animal, mineral, vegetable beings and their ways of making meaning; human beings and human ways of making meaning. When Wahmanholm writes, with others before her, that you are grass, I know it.ireann Lorsung

Praise for Redmouth

Claire Wahmanholms book,Redmouth, is grief-stricken. But how does the poet make grief so beautiful Who knew the language of grief could be stricken itself with the language of beauty Here the deer have disappeared but when the speaker closes her eyes, she can see them / licking the coats of their fawns, anchoring / their spots to their fur to their bodies to the forest floor. Theres simply no doubt that Wahmanholm is a poet because language is the center of all of her work, whether it is describing a decayed world where mountains have unraveled into sand to the stripping away and lifting out of language in the equally stunning erasures sprinkled throughout this book. Yes, darkness razors across these poems, but what comes out of the experience of reading is beauty. I dont know many poets today who can write such beauty into such devastation: The childrens hair lies dewy on the hillocks of their heads / until shreds like cornsilk come off in the breeze. Gorgeously rendered, devastatingly stunning.Victoria Chang

Redmouthis singing. In these poems, Claire Wahmanholm again and again proves that music intensifies not only emotions, but also ideas: I carried a groan in my throat. Mostly it sat silent, but at night / I untethered it note by note. It pillared above me in the dark, / curling into the shape of a dog, a horse, a goat. It made a moat around me. This is a poetry of the greatest skill; this is a book that could make a person who had never cared for poetry before want to write it.Shane McCrae

Redmouthis a book of lush privacies, of lamb-lioned promises (the sort that grief makes, always disingenuously). The doe [is] a torch in the garden, she writes at one pointor excavates, in one of a series of bravura erasures. Claire Wahmanholm is the purest of lyric poets, if purity can be reconciled with the creaturelywhich is, perhaps, the work thatRedmouthmost aspires to. Each poem here is a small, glittering emblem commemorating that effort.G.C. Waldrep

Let all / Headlong fall from this / song, Claire Wahmanholm urges in her prophetic and sonically-lush second collection of poems,Redmouth, which bloomssingingout of the void. As the poet brings us to the nightside / of the heart, words whirl into worlds, from sunrises quartz-cold tongue to a beloveds absence, which clings to the undersides of leaves like chrysalides. There are disappearances in this book: the names of what we love most are driven to the edge of a cliff and the author even imagines molting from her own name, eating it, crushing that sorrow gently into my jaws. But there are also risings from the darkness, from a world left fallow: If of sunflowers.Nomi Stone

Praise for Wilder

Long after I finished readingWilder, I was in grief that its beauty had ended, and also in grief over the spoiled world it describes.Stripped wholly of autobiographical content, the poems in this book seem like the texts written by an ancient collectivetexts that are at once full of wonder and bewilderment, cosmic vision and earthly pain.Except that the books voices arent those of the ancients after all, but of those in a disturbingly probable future where bleach dapples the ground, relaxation tapes play in manic loops, there are bombs in everyones bellies, and grief travels through the body like mercury.Intimate as well as mythic,Wilderis a staggeringly dark proposition about where we are going.And while the book offers no easy scenarios of rescue or solace, its lyricism is nonetheless steeped in vibrant making.As the speaker of one poem says, We had seen many last things: the last acorn, the last lightning storm, the last tide.And maybe, just maybe, in the artfulness brought to that exquisitely vatic catalog, the work of repair takes place.Rick Barot

In Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm invents a language of disintegrating futures, using poems to take us through unraveling fairytales and the volatile terrain of our unraveling planet. Written in 2018, the book feels like a premonition of what is to come . . . What I appreciate most about these speakers is their impulse to move closer to one another. Its a reminder to me to do the same.MAYDAY Magazine

Claire Wahmanholm channels the singular voice of H. D. as she travels us through a landscape wounded, this time not by the industrial military complex, but by the industrial greed complex.Wahmanholms gorgeous,epic lyric breathes across time and place, self and other, blame and consequenceplacing the song of impossible hope not with our news cycle but in our lungs, on our tongues. In its end, this oracular voice teaches us that despite it all we grow tosee deeply into each other, all the way to the marrow.Please God, may it be so.Rebecca Gayle Howell

Wilderis a gorgeous, heady book of fables touched with a kind of black moss, or jellyfish tendrils, or nets and ghosts. Throughout the collection, we are implicated in a never-ending journeycontinuously emerging from the underneath of things, the excavations of the world, the lightless places that lead to the sea. Moments are exquisitely strange and strangely exquisite. There is an abundance of being lost, of encroaching upon apocalyptic moments, of falling back to burning music. InWilder, we are all eternally, or suddenly, feral children left to our own shared devices. Merry with memories that are now suspect, we are led on circular treks through one shifting illusion after another. Doom and freedom seem to be the same in these landscapes but our senses are more alive than ever. Here we are howling, smoking, crooked, afloat through skies of vultures and honeycombs.Sun Yung Shin

Wilder is bewildering and born of collapse. These searing poems spring not only from the end but from the imagined after, excavating from the ruins of this world the birds swooping from the trees to land / beside their own bones, // our bodies reaching down to grab our shadows by the hands. I cannot recall a collection of poems that thrilled and devastated me more. Maggie Smith

Author Bio

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Meltwater, Redmouth, and Wilder, which won the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry and the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Grist, RHINO, Los Angeles Review, Fairy Tale Review, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, The Journal, and Kenyon Review Online, and have been featured by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in the Twin Cities.