Making Water, Laura Jaramillo
Futurepoem, 2022
One of the great things about poetry is that its history is full of the grandiose. Only poets can get away with this. Dante puts his poetry rivals in hell (admittedly, hard to beat this one) and the poetry beef was born. It’s 2023 and Mary Ruefle titles her latest collection The Book. Who else can do this without drawing ire from their contemporaries? Laura Jaramillo.
Despite the dark implications of the epigraph for Making Water, from which the title comes, Jaramillo chooses that over “bleeding in silence.” Water is necessary for life and, Jaramillo suggests, so is art. Making Water is both singular and expansive, both a collection of fragments and a narrative that details the speaker’s wrestling with contemporary life. As the ending of “Quarry” puts it: “Everything I know is fragments swimming off into the / private world of women” (8).
Slivers of this private world are revealed throughout the book. In “Bad Magic” the speaker appears to say to herself: “No longer quite young, you appear to yourself as a photograph / and the bad magic of Images fails you. Having never known your / beauty as a breathing being, a desolation appears to engulf you” (19). “Bread/Wine” uncovers even more as the speaker muses: “Motherhood must be so saturated with the future solitude / of children” and “The avant-garde buries its women like this / without flowers” (22, 23). Jaramillo’s speaker expresses many commonplace concerns, but her exploration is more nuanced. She is a keen observer who feels deeply and whose reactions impact the reader in their haunting phrasing.
The other major theme that ebbs and flows in Making Water is that of being part of a diaspora/immigrant/refugee community and its trials (specifically in coming to the United States). From “Gate Agent”:
Double
escalators in cold light read the hieroglyphs as aerogare
Weight
of sleeplessness mapped onto disconnected corridors.
A
girl bleeds from the mouth at border control. But also a budding
stillness,
move quietly thru q’s (42)
And in “Handedness”:
Just
call me the LOL assassin, or forget to. Austerity is a metal
spike
to adorn our vague tongue with acid dislocating speech.
English,
the language of knives and incorporations,
the
language of instruments (67)
Like water, the speaker is moving, seemingly without end. In “Gate Agent” we’re in an airport and a border, both points of transformation. What’s striking is that this is an American airport and an American border crossing—these are places many of us go at one time or another, but their design appears much differently through the wide-awake eyes. The experience of crossing changes the speaker, both internally (“a budding / stillness”) and externally (“English, the language of knives and incorporations”). How do we explain when words fail? We try (and fail better) in poetry.
I can imagine the world where Making Water is the title of a ghostwritten celebrity autobiography. In that book, the title is a callback to a movie role and the words are empty calories. But lucky for us, we’re in this world where our poets are bold and create art that shakes us out of our sleepwalking. Laura Jaramillo is one such poet and Making Water is a collection that does just that. This book will stick to my heart for a long time.
Nate Logan is the author of Wrong Horse (Moria Books, fall of 2023) and Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He lives in Indiana.