BOOK REVIEW

Sasha Pimentel’s For Want of Water

By Chad Abushanab     FEBRUARY 2, 2018

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Images of love, violence, addiction, and identity are constantly recombined and refreshed in Sasha Pimentel’s National Poetry Series-winning collection For Want of Water and Other Poems. Gregory Pardlo, in his foreword, describes the collection as “a diving of seams, edges, joints, webs, wings, hinges, and more, an apparently inexhaustible archive of parts that flex and clench.” This description brings to mind something both mechanical and organic, made of independent pieces yet functioning as a perfect whole. It’s the perfect image to describe Pimentel’s book, which always feels to be alive, shifting, seeking a new shape.

In many ways, it is difficult to choose a standout poem from the collection. First of all, so many of the poems are simply knockouts, confidently wrought lyrics that always end in surprise. Each poem’s trajectory is an exercise in discovery, as when Pimentel takes us from Oklahoma to the Philippines and back again in one fell swoop in “School Terrorist Exercise,” or the playful way we bounce between the adult students in a dance class in “In Step.” There is an undeniable sense of exploration in these poems—a willingness to ride the melting of language until it finds a landing place. We can feel it in each imagistic shift and change of pace: the poet is letting the inventiveness of the language take the lead.

Too, there is a sense that all the works seem to be in communication with one another in a way that feels vital to the energy of the book. There is a community to these poems, and a sense that each piece is integral to the final effect of the collection—an impressive feat for a book of poems clocking in at over one hundred pages. Each poem seems to propel the reader forward while demanding we look back and reconsider where we’ve come from, what we’ve seen, and how each new piece changes that perspective. In this respect, it is a book that is certain to reward multiple reads, as connections between poems seem to materialize with each new look.

On the first encounter, For Want of Water creates the effect of watching a story unfold from many directions at once, with only the slightest hope of seeing it as a whole. For example, the imagery shared between the two early poems “Our First Year” and “How to Care for a Man, Withdrawing” is intense and immediate. “Our First Year” begins with a scene of paranoia and suffering tempered by love:

You ask me to hold you . . .
if they’ll catch you
like I’ve found you, curled on our tile
damp as a pea sprout.

The claustrophobia brewed in this poem—which seems to want to free itself of the bathroom scene but is always drawn back in—carries over into “How to Care for a Man, Withdrawing,” adding a new layer of emotional sting to the morning-after imagery, becoming even more immediate with the perspective having shifted to the second person. These last lines become a command, insisting that the reader think back to earlier poems for clues of motivation:

And by morning, when he is
gnawing an apple on the balcony,
watching a woman with hairpins step

between cacti, trace your pulpy
hair down your uterus,
to the singular self

which rests there, beneath
your fingers, your hot palm,
despite all your aching flesh.

We carry all of these realizations into the book’s third section, “Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose,” which once again delves into the psychologies of love and addiction, albeit from a much more fractured, lyrical perspective. “Rose is a Rose . . . ,” which is essentially read as one long serial poem, is an excellent example of the thoughtful sequencing of Pimentel’s book. The section acts a sort of centerpiece. Its sparseness is imbued with power by the more linguistically substantial poems preceding it, and its cryptic utterances are pulled into question and revised retroactively as the remainder of the book unfolds. “Autopsy, Juarez,” a single-line poem that reads, “Slowly you stitch a Y, closing the cadaver,” manages to reach so much further because of the violent imagery found in “After Dinner” and “The Eyes Open to a Cry.” Likewise, pieces like “High, high, high,” and “How we love to score / (buying glass pipes at the barrio store)” take on a dark complexity in the face of the later poems “Touched By Dusk, We Know Better Ourselves” and “We’re Really Not OK,” bringing into fuller view a troubled marriage that has been laid out in fragments throughout the book.

The same can be said for the way Pimentel explores borders and boundaries, both internal and external. In his forward, Gregory Pardlo writes, “Some borders are so powerful that they radiate a culture of violence just to enforce the illusion that the border is real.” Of course, For Want of Water explores the concepts of political borders and the strife they create. Many poems make reference to the border town of Juarez, Mexico, constantly reminding the reader of the difference in life created by an invisible line in the sand.

Still, other poems more directly engage with the horrors reinforced by borders, such as the book’s powerful opener “If I Die in Juarez,” or the shockingly visceral “In Their Dark Habits,” wherein the poet describes a girl being held at gunpoint on the Juarez street Avenida 16 de Septiembre. “Will—is for people who can / cross over and not for this girl becoming / a woman the closer she comes . . .” the poet writes, giving us close-ups of fingers curled around triggers as this girl, defiant, moves steadily forward. In this moment, Pimentel exposes the commonality between political borders and personal borders, as the girl leaves her girlhood behind while physically approaching a line that is forbidden to be crossed. We see this idea revisited throughout the book, insisting that even our bodies can be marked by borders, as when Pimentel writes, in “Meditations on Living in a Desert,”

Mothers sleep
like corpses on tables, their faces

wounds just beginning
to make, their bodies maps, lines

drawn by men, the wind, this sun.

In addition to deftly weaving narratives between poems, Pimentel also has quite a gift for marrying form and content, with almost every piece finding a unique sense of line and rhythm that seems well suited to the poem’s voice and interests. There are an extraordinary variety of shapes and formal considerations in this book. Most impressive among these is a riff on Wallace Stevens’s famous blackbird sequence, titled “13 Ways of Knowing Her.” While Stevens often seems detached from his subject—concentrating on how one might “look” at something—Pimentel takes a much more human approach. Her poem, which centers on a daughter whose mother slides further into dementia and the effects it has on both their lives, instead talks of “knowing,” or an attempt at understanding as well as seeing. It’s a heartbreaking sequence wherein each of the thirteen parts introduces new complexities through memories and associations: worries, hope, joys, and sorrows sometimes indistinguishable from one another. Sometimes, however, the formatting seems to get in the way of the poem itself. For example, the “thought and conclusion” format of “Gedankenexperiments” is made even more difficult by the inclusion of break-designs between certain stanzas. At a certain point, this becomes more distracting than thought-provoking, though instances such as these are rare.

“Every poem [in For Want of Water],” writes Pardlo, “is a three-dimensional chess game of intersecting psychological nuances, lyric figuration, innovative story telling, and rhetorical devices.” Indeed, there is nothing static about For Want of Water. It constantly shifts and confounds our expectations, delving into voices and ideas we didn’t know we needed to hear, and shedding light on scenes we didn’t know had gone unseen.




CHAD ABUSHANAB’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2017, Southern Poetry Review, Measure: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Shenandoah, The Hopkins Review, Unsplendid, and 32 Poems, among others. He currently lives in Lubbock, Texas, where he is a doctoral candidate in literature and creative writing at Texas Tech University, as well as an associate editor at Iron Horse Literary Review and the poetry editor at Arcadia. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee.

For Want of Water and Other Poems. By Sasha Pimentel. Beacon Press, 2017. National Poetry Series.

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