Underwater

Underwater by Jill Michelle is an exploration in grief: two pregnancies lost at twenty weeks, a father consumed by Alzheimer's, a body assaulted, a marriage failing. This collection carries the reader on a tidal wave of emotions, making them fight for every breath. In this visceral collection we see survival and strength, even when the speaker feels only the undertow of emotions. Underwater will carry you along on its current and leave you on the edge of land-breathless and shaken, but grateful for reading and surviving its storm.

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Visceral and vulnerable, Jill Michelle's Underwater recreates the enormity of post-traumatic grief, the way it ensnares the body and mind in time. February, which "floods like broken water in our bed-rafts of sad blood," becomes a portal to infant loss, parental loss, sexual assault, and divorce, happening always as if for the first time. Jill Michelle's poems splash the poet's anguish onto the page with abandon and candor, engulfing the reader in her struggle to believe "My body is mine. / It belongs / to me."

Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca

In her bold, devastating poetry collection Underwater, Jill Michelle leans into the grief of multiple pregnancy losses, the end of a marriage and witnessing an aging parent descend into Alzheimer's. How do we survive when in a short period of time, we are faced with loss after loss, when grief "swells your belly like a phantom limb," when "un-sprung seeds...wash right through you like broken water?" Over the course of two Februaries, we walk beside her as she faces tremendous grief, and sometimes, along the way, we join her in the rare moments of relief that sometimes grace us in serendipitous moments-not "the miracle we want" but miracles, nonetheless.

Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms

As we read Jill Michelle's Underwater, we hear her clear voice, and Rich, Bishop, and Brooks, and our grandmothers and sisters, our neighbors who stand up next to us when that's the only thing left to do. These poems remind us that we belong and that our bodies belong to us. Jill Michelle's work ventures through the many facets of grief and, ultimately, after-grief: and while it was far from the miracle we wanted / it was the one we got. As happens. By the time we get to the title poem, we willingly swim next to the poet underwater, and we are changed by it.

Michele Parker Randall, author of The Museum of Everyday Life