Billie Chernicoff
Almagest enough at last! For me, the greatest gift of Waters Of is that it offers a way to hear all of history as just a complicated mechanism for us to make thous of each other, an attempt to bridge the huge gaps between the orders of our feelings. We get “lost in streets whose leaves turn bronze / like the words of God,” and “It takes heat to move / the sound of one / syllable / into what you can see / or touch,” but this book points a way home to water. Billie Chernicoff remembers the color into seeing, welcomes an ox into the house of the alphabet. When I read these poems, I feel a weird, thrilling awakeness. They sing the raucous music of who we’ve been. – Ian Dreiblatt, author of barishonah, translator of Comradely Greetings, The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj The poems in Waters Of are amazing lyrics that explore themes of change and the continual transformation of the present. These poems quietly build and flow, exploring the natural world, myths, the alchemical, different alphabets, literatures and cultures. Time and the changeable nature of life and all materials are at the center of this book; here Chernicoff’s poems exemplify this transmutation in the accretions of her lines and images where each word is a drop “at the root of all things.” In Waters Of the poet’s capacious imagination and intelligence meet at the threshold where everything is possible. – Eléna Rivera, author of Atmosphered, Overture, On the Nature of Position and Tone, translator of The Rest of the Voyage by Bernard Noël. Chernicoff gives us a world set to work, process as alchemy, the chaos within order she manifests with her patient and alert naming “Of.” She’s not shapeshifting but involving us in the radical force of language that is the world. The child of Cupid and Psyche speaking at once from within, and beyond. – Tamas Panitz, author of Uncreated Mirror and Blue Sun
