Spindrift

Launched into the underworld realms of sunken ships, myths, and mercurial pop cultural representations, Spindrift dives into waters where who we thought mermaids were wavers with possibilities, dangers, and hopes. Adrienne Rich once said that “until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.” In her latest collection of prose poems, Laura Madeline Wiseman reminds us that self and fable are intimate nemeses. In these poems, the mermaid becomes a stunning trope for discovery and relentless subversion, and through the collection, we are lured through a seductively dangerous and transitive ecology—bottles of pop float in a listless ocean, sea shanties are whispered from the water, and popular myth and paradox elide. Wiseman leads us into a sumptuous terrain where we must confront legends and wrench from them a truth that will change us. ~ Sara Henning Existing beyond the boundaries of historical renderings and “Waterhouse reproductions,” Wiseman’s mermaids are intelligent, passionate, dangerous, and endangered. Wiseman brings them to life (and death) in exquisitely crafted narratives that play on the edges of dreams and plunge into the deepest human fears. In her hands ocean becomes mirror and the tale/tail of the mermaid becomes very much our own. ~ Jenn Monroe The poems in Spindrift blur the already fragmented lines of gender, offering us mermaids with beards, hairy nipples, and a thirst for damaged remains. Through Wiseman’s formal restraint and inventive definitions, we are invited into the deep sea of the unknown, and we find out the unknown knows us—knows our wars, our corporations, the crumbling frame of our environment, the very bodies we imagine ourselves to be. We learn, in Wiseman’s fantastical and deeply political collection, that the mermaids are watching us, and they worry about the state of our terrible, beautiful world. In reading this stunning chapbook, we get the sense the mermaids are themselves poets, and Wiseman is their trustworthy, imaginative, and attentive scribe. ~ Stacey Waite