A Body of Water: Poems

By Chioma Urama

Beautiful and lyrical, Chioma Urama's A Body of Water is a poetic exploration of ancestry in the American South. These poems are the result of a conversation Urama opened with her ancestors, whose documented and oral histories have been fragmented by a history of enslavement. Urama’s examination of generational trauma collapses linear time and posits that the traumas of the past are present within the consciousness of our bodies until we transmute the energy surrounding them.

The work ebbs and flows between pared-down poems where erasure and white space take on substance and roiling lyric essays that fold in divergent voices from historic documents, music, and film. This collection is both vulnerable and political; a meditation on love and grief; an exploration of loss and connectivity. These poems embrace imagination as a tool to emotionally traverse spaces within history that we are told we cannot enter. A Body of Water is an act of remembering, engaging with the idea that “all water has a perfect memory,” and nothing is ever truly lost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780820358581

Chioma Urama

CHIOMA URAMA's poetry and fiction have been published in the Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Paper Darts, the Normal School, and Prairie Schooner. She received a Fred Shaw Fiction Prize and an honorable mention from the Lindenwood Review Lyric Essay Contest. Urama is a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship alumna and a graduate of the University of Miami MFA program, where she was a Michener Fellow. She teaches creative writing and English composition at the University of New Orleans.

Book preview

THE GEORGIA POETRY PRIZE

The University of Georgia Press established the Georgia Poetry Prize in 2016 in partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, and the University of Georgia. The prize is supported by the Bruce and Georgia McEver Fund for the Arts and Environment.

A BODY OF WATER

A BODY

OF WATER

CHIOMA URAMA

The University of Georgia Press

Athens

Tryna Get Right with God originally appeared in Prairie Schooner.

Blue and "poli—" first appeared in Blackbird, and Skraw in the Lindenwood Review.

© 2021 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Designed by Rebecca A. Norton

Set in 11/16 Garamond Premier Pro

Printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on

Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

Council on Library Resources.

Most University of Georgia Press titles are

available from popular e-book vendors.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946232

ISBN: 9780820358574 (paperback)

ISBN: 9780820358581 (ebook)

for Barbara and Lionel

and all the Blues in between

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. Floods is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

—TONI MORRISON

CONTENTS

BRIDE

Bride: Barbara Ann Gardner

Worten

Isac Worten

Google Search for My Ancestor John Best, Plantation, and North Carolina

A 70% Probability That You Will Have the Same Attachment Style as Your Mother (or, Six Generations Removed from Enslavement)

Very Used Queen-Sized Mattress

The Future as Written by 16-Year-Old Girls

As Told by 16-Year-Old Girls

a windowless room

a glass argument

Suddenly, It’s Dusk

I’ve never known

Tryna Get Right with God

So Wildly Bad (Blue-Black Girl)

GROOM

Groom: Lionel Blue

Benjamin Blue

Lionel Blue as According to U.S. Census Data (or, Many U.S. Schools Taught Spelling by Phonics; or, the Spelling of a Name Was Up to the Census Taker; or, Your Grandfather’s People Were Never Taught to Read)

Skraw

Rocky Mount Mills

State v. Will, 18 N.C. 121 (1834)

poli—

Weighing Cotton

he said he had a child

Ka chi fo!

Mending in the Pediatric Ward

My Grandmother Was Igbo

Recipe for Jollof Rice

An Inisolable Portrait

Blue

after years

WITNESS

A Body of Water

Bible Study

Jehovah’s People

sometimes (frequently)

I