Where the Waters Know My Name

Where the Waters Know My Name is a lyric chapbook about survival, recognition, and the slow work of becoming inhabitable to oneself. Moving through five elemental sections-pressure, suspension, drift, attunement, and interval-these poems trace a life shaped by accumulation: of harm and tenderness, silence and sound, loss and return.

Water serves as both metaphor and method. It erodes, carries, reflects, and remembers. Across the collection, the body emerges as a site of both rupture and intelligence-one that learns, often wordlessly, how to endure and how to rest. The poems speak from within lived experience rather than about it, favoring image over declaration, atmosphere over argument. Trauma is present, but never sensationalized; healing appears not as resolution, but as continuity.

The early poems navigate coercion, dissociation, and the thinning of self that follows repeated extraction. Later sections turn toward reciprocity, quiet companionship, and attunement-moments where presence replaces vigilance, and trust is rebuilt not through spectacle but through patience. Silence is not emptiness here, but a medium; stillness is not stasis, but consent.

Written in spare, luminous language, Where the Waters Know My Name engages themes of identity, embodiment, gendered experience, and recovery without relying on confessional excess. Its voice is intimate yet archetypal, grounded in elemental imagery-rain, current, stone, breath-allowing personal history to resonate as shared terrain.

This collection will resonate with readers of contemporary lyric poetry who are drawn to work that listens closely: to the body, to memory, to the quiet thresholds where change begins. It is a book for those who have lived through fracture and are learning, gently and deliberately, how to remain.