Mother Water Ash

Poems

Nicole Cooley

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9780807182635
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Mother Water Ash, a wrenching new collection of poems by Nicole Cooley, explores the personal grief of a mother's sudden death alongside the environmental crises of the storms, fires, and floods that now dominate our world. Examining the landscapes of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, these poems ponder what it means to mourn in the face of ecological catastrophe, and traipse the terrains left by loss.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• On the Mississippi River Levee, Styrofoam Cup in My Hand
• Sixteen Years to the Day Another Hurricane Reverses
• Missing
• [With each Mississippi River flood, water spills out of the river]
• My Mother’s Ashtray
• Monochords
• Still Life, South Galvez Street, 1978
• [Twenty miles from the Gulf of Mexico’s coast]
• Mother Water Ash
• Breathwork
• Missing
• [Another summer of the vanishing. Summer]
• Still Life, Jefferson Highway
• My Mother’s Nightgowns Smell Like Smoke
• Missing
• [Once the coastline spoke: I plan to disappear and tell you nothing]
• Monochords
• Being the Oldest Daughter
• Mourning, Silk and Lace
• [Could the California fires ever fill the Mississippi]
• Missing
• Still Life, River Road
• Missing
• On the Levee Once Again I Walk to Sharpen
• [Ten years into the After, the Mississippi]
• After My Mother Dies I Crave the Seventies
• My Mother’s Matches
• Elegy, Napoleon House, New Orleans
• Monochords
• New Orleans Love Poem
• Downriver
• Acknowledgments
• Notes