The Lost Shoreline: Epistemology and Experience in Wave Says (2021)
Courtesy of Drew Beamer via Unsplash
By Emma Ginader
I loved nothing more than plunging headfirst into the waves as a kid at the beach. After particularly large ones, I sometimes felt disoriented and unsure where to look for the shore after I emerged.
K.M. English’s debut poetry collection, Wave Says (Kore Press), mirrors this experience, deliberately working to unsettle and knock the reader down into the undertow.
Released in May 2021, Wave Says is divided into four sections, with the final section dedicated to the “Nocturne” sequence and the titular long poem. English, however, unifies all the sections through her use of white space, punctuation marks, repetition, and interruptions to mimic the tides and erosion. Thoughts remain incomplete, slashes allow words to overlap each other, and “no other / discovery yet made.”
Wave Says functions arguably as a culmination of English’s life-long inquisition into the nature of knowing. “An artist creates from who they are and where they are in that place and time, both literally and figuratively. You’re creating anew, but you’re also creating from materials that you’ve collected and are gestating in you over time,” she said in an April 18th, 2021 The Sacramento Bee interview.
These experiences do not linearly exist within ourselves but are instead churned together. The 1984 rape and murder of seven-year-old Marcella Davis, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the 2012 Sandy Hook Shooting, and the 2018 death of baby Orca co-exist side-by-side within the collection. These events, represented by a poem, are recounted in chronological sequence: the 2018 Orca death comes first in “Mother Orca Carries Stillborn Calf Over 17 Days and 1,000 Miles,” followed by “Life Below Sea Level: for the people of New Orleans.” The third section begins with “Falconer,” a vigil for Marcella Davis 37 years after her death. Three poems after, “Lullaby” takes the reader 28 years forward to the Sandy Hook shootings.
I found this disordering to be a particularly smart move. Because these poems were spaced throughout the book non-sequentially among more non-narrative poems, I had to work to find the connections between these poems. This technique makes sense as the process of understanding ourselves and our history can be an onerous process. I recall once hearing that when a person lives through an event that shapes their perceptions, they become more aware of when similar incidents happen. These later events reinforce their beliefs, preoccupations, and fears. Through these experiences, English seemingly developed an acute awareness of all the ways the world can harm her children.
“You see / I am afraid of everything. / I cannot close my eyes,” English laments in “Lullaby.” For her, knowing does not offer a reprieve or guarantee safety for her children. “Let me teach you how to lie. Each night locks turned / we sing I'm not afraid to die...When he comes, I want you to sing it,” she writes, “just like this. Close your eyes / to the dark and use this trick, steal away.”
For her, knowing creates anxiety, instability, and more questions. “Mother Orca Carries Stillborn Calf Over 17 Days and 1,000 Miles” envisions the mother Orca's final moments with her child's corpse before she stops carrying him. The poem begins with “If,” which acts as a hinge in time and reality. Rather than just being presented as the author’s imagining, this conjunction allows readers to engage the past as the present moment and a definite possibility. It is a way to otherwise control and reassure ourselves about a horrible and painful experience. However, the speaker still runs into uncertainty despite knowing the tracks of her imagination. “when [he] [falls] without [the drama of] [acceptance is not] [a deep] [his body] [she].” The phrase “acceptance is not” cuts off “the drama of,” as if the speaker cannot fully articulate or grasp the exact magnitude of the mother's decision to let her calf go.
This breakdown of knowledge and comfort appears again in “Falconer.” Like in “Mother Orca,” English uses a rhetorical device to condense the present and past, the imagined and real. Throughout the work, English talks to both Davis and her murderer. At one point, English asks, “When did you leave / your body Marcie.” In this prayer, she hopes that Davis left her body and escaped the torture inflicted upon her. However, English undercuts this possibility in the following line. “Left your body— / wound that you / left, still / girl / who / feeling” implies the pain and tragedy is still ongoing for both Davis and the community. With that realization, English breaks down even more and becomes more distraught. The poem ends with “Marcie girl / are / we” as if the speaker no longer knows what to ask, unsure where to find the shoreline anymore.
Despite seeming to say that there will always be gaps in our comprehension, English appears to say that it is okay. What truly matters is to move past the breaking point of the waves of our minds and desperate need to know and out into the deeper sea of action, physicality, and existence. In the poem "The Edge," English witnesses a man polluting a river with a tire. Despite recognizing it would end up in the sea, she was driving too fast to stop him. It is not the knowledge that seems to upset her but her lack of action. The collection even ends with her realizing she no longer “wanted a math / to teach it again and again like they used to all / in questions/dictate some faceless / formula." Instead, she asks to "let me feel you.”
Wave Says is an often enigmatic read that is uninterested in giving its readers any easy answers. After writing this review, I worry I missed or mis-intrepreted an element of the text. However, it dares the reader to ask themselves, “What does it mean actually to know something, and what does it mean actually to engage with that awareness?”
Emma Ginader is a poet, critic, and editor. She graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in Writing with a Concentration in Poetry. Her poetry has most recently appeared in the Paper Teller Diorama anthology, Lavender Review, The Moth Magazine, and South Broadway Ghost Society. She aims to highlight new voices and re-explore the old.