Water Lessons - Paperback

by Lisa Dordal (Author)

Through deeply personal and culturally grounded narratives, Water Lessons explores the relationship between reality and imagination, faith and doubt, presence and absence, as the speaker grapples with multiple dimensions of grief arising from her mother's alcoholism and eventual death; her father's deepening dementia; and her own childlessness. Against the backdrop of these personal griefs, the speaker scrutinizes the patriarchal underpinnings of the world she grew up in as well as her complicity in systemic racism as a white girl growing up in the 70s and 80s. Woven throughout the book are the speaker's meditations on a divine presence that, for her, is both keenly felt and necessarily elusive, mirroring the speaker's ultimate celebration of her unborn daughter as a "lovely fiction" who is both here and not here.

Author Biography

Lisa Dordal is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University and is the author of Mosaic of the Dark, which was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; Water Lessons, a Lambda Literary most-anticipated-book for 2022; and Next Time You Come Home, a Lambda Literary most-anticipated-book for 2023. Lisa is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Watson Poetry Prize, and the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, Narrative, Image, Best New Poets, Christian Century, and CALYX. Her website is lisadordal.com.