Water Castle

The poems of Natalie Solmer's Water Castle both seek and resist homeland, from ancestral Eastern Europe, to immigrant grandparents in America's Rust Belt, to her partner's, and therefore her children's, Caribbean origins. Our speaker is raised among the empty factories of a city on the wane, mint fields, ethanol plants, a winding river, "holy with bacteria" and tainted by White history, and a Great Lake. Fluidity is everywhere-river, lake, ocean, ghosts, rain, milk, blood-a fluidity of memory wending into "the not-past-past," and a multiplicity of selves. What holds firm is the Water Castle of the imagination, of language, and of love. Solmer, "without kingdom," paints for us a watery queendom. Her debut collection offers us a deeply honest, lyric pushback against erasure.

-Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry



Water Castle is first and foremost a love story: to self, significant other, and family. Yet, Water Castle is much more-a lyrical, meditative search for the origins of self. Traveling from the Midwest to her partner's home of Montego Bay, the speaker shares pearls of truth like when she refuses to close her son's gap teeth because of "the Morgan Parker poem / about the gap in Angela Davis's teeth speaking / to the gap in James Baldwin's smile" and her son's paternal grandmother's regret of closing hers. Water Castle's speaker calls out racism from her privileged White position while also showing love and gratitude for the people who made her.

-Douglas Manuel, author of Trouble Funk and Testify



Natalie Solmer's Water Castle begins, "Consider with me, my moats"-those magical aqueous circles protecting sacred interiors. Inescapable winds and wounds of inheritance push the speaker into musings about memory, art, family, earth, motherhood. Past and present whisper their secrets: the sassing ghosts of two grandmothers, the lengthening legs of the poet's children. We are caught in the spell of this poet's cyclical, mystical wonder. But for me, the heart of Water Castle resides in the power of love "to lift for a moment / the foggy veil of this terrible / earth."

-Alessandra Lynch, author of Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment and Pretty Tripwire