Mother Water Ash - by Nicole Cooley (Paperback)

About the Book

"Mother Water Ash, a wrenching new collection of poems by Nicole Cooley, explores both personal grief and environmental crisis - the storms, fires, and floods that now dominate our world. At its core, the book asks what it means to experience personal loss in the face of this ecological catastrophe, specifically amid environments throughout New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Focusing on her mother's sudden death, this is a book about profound loss but also recovery. Poems in the collection seek to find a new language and form for grief, as Cooley deploys a range of poetic forms-from free verse to fixed forms to the lyric essay to prose poems to monochords-in search of ways to capture the fluctuations of grieving. The poems also examine the experience of mothering as they document the speaker's life as a mother, navigating the loss of her own mother. Some of the book's driving questions include: How do we mourn a mother and continue to mother ourselves? How do we live in a world that feels on the brink of destruction? What can poetry do in the face of environmental crisis? In answer, Mother Water Ash offers poems of stark emotion, evocative detail, and abiding endurance as responses to overwhelming grief"--

Book Synopsis

Mother Water Ash, a wrenching new collection of poems by Nicole Cooley, explores the personal grief of a mother's sudden death alongside the environmental crises of the storms, fires, and floods that now dominate our world. Examining the landscapes of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, these poems ponder what it means to mourn in the face of ecological catastrophe, and traipse the terrains left by loss.

Review Quotes

"A mother's body dies, disappears, is burned, but other bodies remain: daughters, granddaughters, a widower--bodies of water that run through and around New Orleans, both touching down and moving on. This book too is a body, a flood, a torrential downpour enough to alter a landscape and any sense of home, reminding us that all memories erode."--Timothy Liu

"In Mother Water Ash, Nicole Cooley mourns the death of her mother from the familiar and doomed landscape of New Orleans. These poems overflow with an essential truth: beloved people will change and disappear, while slightly more permanent cities, rivers, and levees have the audacity to go on without us. Read these haunting poems and weep."--Alison Pelegrin

"The remarkable poems in this collection linger in remaking the world after the known world is lost. This is powerful poetry that attends to what we pass on in what seem to be unbearable aftermaths. The book, in all its grief, is paean to life somehow someway."--Tonya M. Foster

About the Author

Nicole Cooley is the author of six books of poems, including Of Marriage and Girl after Girl after Girl. Her first book, Resurrection, won the Walt Whitman Award. Raised in New Orleans, Cooley is professor of English in the MFA Program for Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY, and lives outside of New York City with her family.