Heavy Waters

Ed Luker’s hotly anticipated collection Heavy Waters and is a mixture of poetic and prosaic workings on the sea, borders, and border violence. This edition comes with a foreword from Verity Spott, in which she writes that the book is: “[a] collection of poetry that has resolved to speak of the terrifying crossings; the depth weighed up, the air weighed down – human lives pushed and pulled, fleeing and returning in the crisis who longs for our silence, in lyric refusal.” “The poems in Heavy Waters brilliantly register the smooth functioning of social force, the way it hangs on the literal incorporation of power as it is internalized, embodied, and contradictorily experienced. In a world in which ‘loss’ has become a hardened economic category, Luker returns ‘loss’ to the affective animation of the body, attuning our corpus to avert the local and global catastrophes that are crushing it.” – Rob Halpern.