Meltwater: Poems

by Claire Wahmanholm

Overview

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 parent’s joy is accompanied by the gnaw of remorse. And yet, Wahmanholm recognizes, children bind us to the world—to 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 vanishing—of biodiversity, of climate stability, of a sense of safety—Meltwater is both vindication and balm.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639551019
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	03/14/2023
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	313,254
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

IN A LAND WHERE EVERYTHING IS TRYING TO KILL ME, I CONSIDER LETTING IT

All I would need to do is stand for too long

beneath its jagged, capable shadow.

 

All I would have to do is let my skin absorb

that shade until my blood runs at 94 degrees.

 

Hypothermia is so much warmer than

I thought. The confusion begins here,

 

the mingling. Every time I walk beneath a tree,

more of me tangles with the breeze that lifts

 

its leaves, which are always 70 degrees, regardless

of geography. It would be so easy, listening

 

to this flash inside my brain, this fact

that takes up no more space than the open mouth

 

of a stoma. 50 microns. Half the width

of a neuron. It would be so easy, the sharpened

 

blade sliding like wind through whatever

comes within range. I snap my mind away

 

like a sleeve from an open flame, but the thought

will finish what it started. It will home

 

like salmon, or whales tracing the aura

of a continent. Like a missile. The wire

 

has been tripped, the fluids in my ear have risen

into waves by the alarm. How long

 

have I been standing here. Who is the woman

lying in the shade.

***

M 

M is for murmur and mutter—the ambiguity of the mobius strip, the marsh, the maybe trembling between two membranes. M is for mother, dark matter, the matrix that cradles the muscadine, marble, monosyllable, moon. Be menagerie, multivocal, madrigal. I carry your multitudes through midsummer, through marigolds and mayapples, through mud. I hide you in the middle of a maze, bury you like minerals in the mine of my body. You are marrow-deep, marine, mollusk in your mother of pearl hull. The months are a moat between you and melancholy, missiles, mourning. M is for the meteor magnifying through the telescope’s lens, the metronome unmuffling. M is for metamorphosis and mutant. I am more and more mountainous. I am a mare rolling in a midnight meadow, all musk and muzzle. M is for the migrations of monarchs, mule deer, mullet, for magnetic fields, for the way the world pulls you from me and you materialize. You are motor turned music, machine turned mortal. I am mended and marooned somewhere between mist and milk. I molt, am mangled. I molt, am myself.

***

THE FUTURE

 

The body is lined with it, like a nest,

like the down the eider plucks from her breast

 

until her nest is a gray mist weighed down

by five sea-green eggs. At the end of each season,

 

only one duckling will survive to fly

away. This is an average. On any given day,

 

all of the eggs may hatch, all of the hatchlings

may freeze. The gulls may cruise in rings

 

above the nesting colonies, the polar bear

may not surge ashore. The female eider

 

can lay eggs for eighteen years, more or less.

Without wanting to, I do the math. She will lose

 

seventy-two chicks before she dies, those numbers

traded against her own long years by nature’s

 

calm calculus. There is only so much life

to go around. It isn’t like a flame, whose belief

 

in itself is enough to burn a forest down.

Instead, we have been given one

 

bolt of cloth to be shared. The choice is

in how you shear it. I say “choice”

 

but of course it’s not. It’s a vast, organic machine

running like static behind everything; the gene

 

doesn’t want anything, doesn’t want, doesn’t

exist except by cosmic mistake. Accident

 

means to move toward a fall. And so they fall

and fall through time, carelessly, like a carnival

 

ride whose switch is stuck in the “on” position.

I would like to die before losing any children.

 

In fact, there is no reason for me to be alive anymore.

Having borne my code into the future,

 

even if only by another lifetime, I could not matter

less. Eider ducklings enter the water

 

motherless, will dive for mussels on their own

just one day after hatching. If they escape starvation,

 

the gulls, the cold, when will the dying begin?

When do the cells start to multiply or weaken?

 

The eider’s scientific name is somateria mollisima:

the softest body. My own is already less terra firma

 

and more open water, more unmooring, more

losing. I may have already begun to rupture

 

invisibly, my cells may have already begun

their unwinding. Time picks us up then sets us down

 

a little further on, pulses through us like a wave.

Sometimes it seems as if the eggs survive

 

just to keep the nest from blowing away.

I have stayed, even though it makes me prey

 

to worse things than freezing wind or gulls.

I am mostly glad we are not wild animals.

 

I am mostly glad about most things, even

the future, even though I know that broken

 

shells may float on its waters. I need to think

that the eider doesn’t grieve the breaking.

***

XYZ

 

The year yellows. The yolk of yesterday’s sun lazes in the yard, piled beside the yew and yarrow, the zucchini vine that never flowered, the waxy zenobia. It sprawls like yarn, a yawn that won’t be swallowed back into summer’s mouth. I am zombie-eyed, zephyr-minded, would sleep until the next equinox if I could, would relax my heart until it stopped. The cold rises through the thorax and into the larynx. The autumn haze is heavy and thick as a smashed yam. Through it, pollen floats like yeast. It is hard to follow the wren’s pitch and yaw, its yammering. Yearling, heir of my X, you are full of the reflex to live. I am hexed, cannot be coaxed to thrive. Zygote means yoke, the zipping of two bodies together, the axes on which are plotted a galaxy of Xs and Ys. Somewhere in that matrix is your syntax of chromosomes. You are a black box, a maze of invisible zigzags, beyond exegesis. The toadflax freezes from radix to apex. The ilex is evergreen but untouchable, the fuzz of some animal transfixed in its thorns. I think about extinction, the unidirectional vortex of time, read all the obsolete entries of the dictionary: the codex ywrit in lampe blacke; the yale ykoweryn by phlox up to its helixed horns; whelps ydreynt; the mouse in grasse by the fox ylaid; the phoenix from its sooty nest yborn ad infitium. I don’t care for eternity, its violence boxed and distributed into months. I don’t care for the zodiac, twisting back on itself like a zero. It only reminds me that your star is not fixed, that no stars are, that all measurements—azimuth to zenith—measure only emptiness. Even the sphinx knew that time is the most vexing puzzle. I envy the zebra distributing its name endlessly among the zebrafish, the zebra mussel, the zebra finch. Back in the garden, the drizzle glazes into ice. A bronzed apple thuds, a broken yo-yo. I cannot say no. I allow myself to be yanked back up, exhausted. Seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it. By yes, by you.

Table of Contents

O 

Hunger

You Will Soon Enter a Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill You

Glacier

Meltwater

M

In a Land Where Everything is Already Trying to Kill Me, I Enter a New Phase of My Life in Which It Would Be Very Bad If I Died

Meltwater

Metamorphosis with Milk and Sugar

In a Land Where Everything is Trying to Kill You, I Teach You to be an Autotomist

Poem That Cries Wolf

Glacier

Meltwater

Starling

More Rabbits

Primer

The Child Puts Apples into the Mouth of the Tree

Meltwater

The New Horticulture

Glacier

Apotropaei

In A Land Where Everything Is Trying To Kill Me, I Consider Letting It

The Sun, the Ship

Meltwater

At the End We Turn Into Trees

Glossary of What I’ll Miss

The New Fear

The New Language

Glacier

Meltwater

P

Deathbed Dream with Extinction List

If Anyone Asks

In Sorrow Thou Shalt Bring Forth Children

Poem With No Children In it

Meltwater

The Future

Meltwater

:

The Empty Universe

XYZ

 

Notes

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/26/2023

Wahmanholm (Redmouth) delivers a dynamic collection of poems in which parenthood, nature, reverie, and anticipation intersect in a surreal landscape that illustrates the cognitive dissonance of an age of impending destruction. Death and obsolescence reign in these poems, luring the author into a civil war between agency and dread. She describes intrusive thoughts of death: “I snap my mind away// like a sleeve from an open flame, but the thought/ will finish what it started”; irrepressible longing: “I woke from myself, cupped within sorrow’s hands./ In that blood light, I was a sudden nebula of desire”; self-preservation: “I can see the smoke, can close up my throat on command”; and necessary hope: “I have declared myself a believer in magic,/ have dared to imagine my children are safe.” These poems are full of lyricism, humility, and tactility, accented by virtuosic alliteration and, in some moments, wry gems: “I do not need to play dead./ Not even death would want to play with me.” Her mastery of language is most conspicuous in the title entry, an erasure piece sourced from Lacy M. Johnson: “O uncommonly sunny/ death// that/ brightened// the// summer/ snow.// the melting point/ of// ice/ is/ Empire// formed by dust/ ;// we// were/ baptized/ in// concrete// and// our/ own acceleration.” This is a hypnotic and devastating maelstrom of introspection. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Meltwater 

"Wahmanholm  delivers a dynamic collection of poems in which parenthood, nature, reverie, and anticipation intersect in a surreal landscape that illustrates the cognitive dissonance of an age of impending destruction. [...] This is a hypnotic and devastating maelstrom of introspection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“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 planet’s forecast”—Racket
“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

"Meltwater guides readers through a deep-welling grief for a world in upheaval while offering an antidote to some of that grief. While the collection is heavy with mourning, it is also subtly and deftly uplifting, prompting us to remember the simple things that we “suffer the empty universe for.”—Zoe Binder, zyzzyva

“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 electric—and I am charged, crackling, and grateful for these stunning poems. Meltwater makes 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 Wahmanholm’s Meltwater, ‘the world’ means entanglement. In these poems, things pour through one another; even thinkings pour through one another, via the melting form of the erasure. There is no outside to the book’s 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 that is ‘us’: 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.”—Éireann Lorsung

Praise for Redmouth

“Claire Wahmanholm’s 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.’ There’s 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 don’t know many poets today who can write such beauty into such devastation: ‘The children’s hair lies dewy on the hillocks of their heads / until shreds like cornsilk come off in the breeze.’ Gorgeously rendered, devastatingly stunning.”—Victoria Chang

“Redmouth is 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

“Redmouth is 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 point—or excavates, in one of a series of bravura erasures. Claire Wahmanholm is the purest of lyric poets, if purity can be reconciled with the creaturely—which is, perhaps, the work that Redmouth most 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 blooms—singing—out of the void. As the poet brings us to ‘the nightside / of the heart,’ words whirl into worlds, from sunrise’s ‘quartz-cold tongue’ to a beloved’s 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 reading Wilder, 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 collective—texts that are at once full of wonder and bewilderment, cosmic vision and earthly pain. Except that the book’s voices aren’t 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 everyone’s bellies, and grief travels through the body like mercury. Intimate as well as mythic, Wilder is 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. It’s 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. Wahmanholm’s gorgeous, epic lyric breathes across time and place, self and other, blame and consequence—placing 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 to ‘see deeply into each other, all the way to the marrow.’ Please God, may it be so.”—Rebecca Gayle Howell 

“Wilder is 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 journey—continuously 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. In Wilder, 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

From the Publisher