water is never still by JoAnna Scandiffio

JoAnna Scandiffio’s water never sleeps is exhilarating, deeply moving, and completely original. The poet plunges us into the intimacy of family life and into the magical world of childhood, full of family myths and family talismans. water never sleeps is an elegy for the poet’s mother, and the book includes all of the grief that is inherent in an elegy. Here the profound sense of loss is balanced by an equally profound sense of the joy of life. water never sleeps moves at warp speed, treating the reader as a member of the family and revealing every secret: I steal/her lipstick. …her lipstick is calypso/it burns my lips… These are deeply feminist poems, meditations on the process of growing up as a woman: “boys whistle/at what they fear…” If water never sleeps were a novel, it would be a family saga in the manner of Gabriel García Marquez, three hundred pages of dense prose. In Scandiffio’s hands, we experience that world in the blink of an eye, as the passionate and inexpressible experience of a dream. This book is a gift to all of us: all the secrets of the world in one cake…

–Edward Smallfield, editor of Apogee Press.

“In this dazzling suite of poems, a young speaker creates spells and rituals to hold memories of her dead mother. This is elegy forged from a child’s deepest imaginings—a poetic sequence faceted as light on water, and shining.“

–Julie Bruck