Weren't We Natural Swimmers, Chapbook with Tram Editions
Pleasure and beauty pulse with stubborn purpose in Aliah Lavonne Tigh’s debut. The poems, orbiting the climate change front lines in Houston, reveal the physical and physic aftermath of ecological disaster – the unwelcomed flood waters intermingle with economic sanctions, domestic warfare, the erotic, grief, family, the divine, ecology, and the osmosis of pain. Through vivid juxtaposition, electric lyric, and braided narrative, an ardent and unflinching argument for a new American pastoral emerges.
Weren’t We Natural Swimmers
ISBN: 9798885678261
Weren’t We Natural Swimmers is an invitation to look deeply at disasters made intimate and personal -- dead and dying fathers and uncles in a landscape of burning refineries, flooded rooms and a looming never-ending war. Despite this terrifying world, despite heartbreak, Aliah Lavonne Tigh celebrates “the beauty our eyes can unhide,” the luminous natural world still present and wondrous.
—Ching-In Chen, author of The Heart’s Traffic and recombinant