Through deeply personal and culturally grounded narratives, Water Lessons explores the relationship between reality and imagination, faith and doubt, presence and absence, as the speaker...

Through deeply personal and culturally grounded narratives, Water Lessons explores the relationship between reality and imagination, faith and doubt, presence and absence, as the speaker grapples with multiple dimensions of grief arising from her mother's alcoholism and eventual death; her father's deepening dementia; and her own childlessness. Against the backdrop of these personal griefs, the speaker scrutinizes the patriarchal underpinnings of the world she grew up in as well as her complicity in systemic racism as a white girl growing up in the 70s and 80s. Woven throughout the book are the speaker's meditations on a divine presence that, for her, is both keenly felt and necessarily elusive, mirroring the speaker's ultimate celebration of her unborn daughter as a "lovely fiction" who is both here and not here.

Author: Lisa Dordal
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press, Inc.
Published: 04/01/2022
Pages: 70
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.27lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.21d
ISBN: 9781625570314


Review Citation(s):
PW Booklife Reviews 01/31/2022

About the Author
Dordal, Lisa: -

Lisa Dordal holds a Master of Divinity and a Master of Fine Arts, both from Vanderbilt University, and teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt. Her first full-length collection of poetry, MOSAIC OF THE DARK (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, the Robert Watson Poetry Prize from the Greensboro Review, and the Betty Gabehart Prize from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including Best New Poets, New Ohio Review, The Sun, Narrative, RHINO, Ninth Letter, CALYX, The Greensboro Review, and Vinyl Poetry.