AT SEA

is a collection that — at times introspective and confessional, at times perceptively aimed outward, toward a vertiginous world — sails the pathway between trauma and healing. Readers are taken aboard into a microcosm where wonder meets waterlogged torment and self-harm; where grief, euphoria and longing coexist; where womanhood is as joyful and dizzying an experience as it is searing; where peeling the layers of cultural identity is like plunging into the most opaque and briny deep. While the act of remembering has solitary, melancholy tinges, Aïcha Martine Thiam’s pen never wavers, nor does it stray far from the impulse to bear witness, to do justice, and to connect with kindred souls.

PRAISE FOR AT SEA

“AT SEA is Aïcha Martine Thiam’s sublime siren’s song of the emerging self. The verse drifts dexterously from treading water, “a fish in your sea” to the triumphant thrash of the “pirate mermaid” who navigates and narrates her own divine depths.”

—Kristin Garth, author of Girlarium and Editor-in-Chief of Pink Plastic House

“A heartfelt, humorous, open-ended discussion about what it means to be a Black woman in the world today. I felt so seen within the pages of AT SEA, that I oftentimes had to look through the pages to see if Thiam had dedicated this book to me. Wonderful. Just wonderful.”

—Katherine D. Morgan, Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus and author of No Self-Respecting Woman

“Aïcha Martine rejects the cultural expectations that dictate what her story as a Black girl should be. In AT SEA, she tells her own coming-of-age story, unraveling trauma and exploring healing with all their nuance and complexity. AT SEA grapples with grief, disillusionment, and being forced to grow up too quickly and reaches for moments of childlike wonder. Aïcha Martine creates her own mythology complete with Bluebeard and mermaids and sailors. She fluidly slips between poetry and prose as she rewrites her story, imagining all the ways it could be. You can hear the rhythm and musicality of her poetry as lines echo into refrains, as she returns to a familiar line, only to twist it and imbue it with new meaning. Aïcha Martine finds liberty in her voice in AT SEA.”

—Carolina VonKampen, Publisher and Editor in Chief of Capsule Stories

“Dizzying, perplexing, delightful lines, brimming with glimpses from a nimble mind. I can’t read these poems quickly. Can I take my time? I love, and I understand, how this poet leaps at us, arms wide (“Always, I get operatic.”), and then retreats, self-doubting (“How can I trust the triteness of my senses?”). She’s like your smartest, funniest, oddest friend, the one you always want more of, the one whose place you long to visit (too often? You’ll bring wine), and sigh into her couch and ask her, again, “Will you show me what you’re writing?””

—Ellen Parker, founder and Editor-in-Chief of FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry

“AT SEA is a collection of poetry that explores the depth of grief, cultural identity, trauma and all of the emotions that come along with them. Just like a voyage on the ocean each page looms with magical moon — like wordcraft that pulls the tide. Some of these tides are contemplated in a slow rocking and others are tumultuous. Aïcha Martine Thiam uncovers the shipwrecks of sadness and despair with a deft hand and pulls us to the surface gasping for air. This book is a full fathom five into the sea change of human experience.”

—Juliette van der Molen, author of Death Library, Mother, May I?, Anatomy of A Dress and Confess: The Untold Story of Dorothy Good

“Aïcha Martine Thiam’s AT SEA pulsates with a magnetic, mercurial energy at its center as it takes its own advice to “find your own language/make your grief sing”. These poems shapeshift, often channelling the mythic and elemental as it deftly interrogates themes of womanhood, trauma and cultural inheritance. The speaker of AT SEA refuses to look away. She holds a bright fury in her hands, a desire for redress and still, hope. “Still yearning to be handled tenderly,” this is a collection that urges the reader too to handle ourselves and each other with a little more tenderness. Here is a collection unafraid to cast us adrift in turbulent waters, but always with a promise to reel us back in.”

 —Jihyun Yun, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and author of Some Are Always Hungry

“In AT SEA, Martine uses repetition to examine the state of one’s womanhood under patriarchy. In villanelles and pantoums, as well as other poetic forms, Martine approaches themes of grief and trauma through a succession of anhedonic refrains. At times reminiscent of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, the many voices in these poems echo the pain and longing of one another. Like the men Martine observes, she has “long understood the small workings of one’s hatred for women” and demands of the reader, “Could/you live with yourself if you did not have your say?” By the end of AT SEA, your answer will certainly be no. By the end of AT SEA, “You, too, may one day want to fling up your heart like confetti.””

—Isobel O’Hare, founding editor of Dream Pop and author of all this can be yours

“To set adrift in the symphony of Aïcha Martine Thiam’s poetry collection, AT SEA, is to wade into the personal mythology of irised terrains, passions, emotions, and perceptions of an agile, luminescent mind. Rapt with the desire for love, for life — from the prosaic to the sacred — Thiam radiates deep knowing and resonance. Exploring the joys and anguish of being a woman of color in a world that habitually exiles and others, the speaker discerns: “Brown girl: you don’t get a plot twist.” And yet these exquisite poems keep searching, building, transcending, like the tide — seeking some measure of justice, some grace — for the soul defies rote delineations. “Heart lies in the dented hollow of my lung, skin/of solitude swathes the body like a sheet, and/I cherish the steady cadence of my bone,” there is rapturous might in these pages.”

—Su Hwang, recipient of the Minnesota Book Awards in poetry and author of Bodega

“What does it mean to grieve a life while living it? How can one return to a body unmoored? AT SEA approaches these vital questions with spirit and desire, mapping states of emotional liminality across memory's land, sea, and sky. The result is a cartography of loss: love and connection, childhood and direction, autonomy. Aïcha Martine Thiam is a writer of striking depth and dexterity, sharply aware of self and others, environment and arrangements. These poems are incisive and deeply felt, atmospherically diffuse and dream-hearted, marked by a singular musicality and magnetism that pulls its materials and assembles them into a self-contained world, as if from natural order. AT SEA is a powerful and adventurous debut, a book of shifting relationalities written with cold and light, heat and shadow, and most of all, courage.”

- Lily Duffy, author of TACT, Sour Candy and Wet Water Hill, and Co-Founder/Editor of DREGINALD

Aïcha Martine Thiam is a trilingual and multicultural writer, musician and artist who goes where the waves take her. She might have been a kraken in a past life. She's an Editor at Reckoning, Editor-in-Chief, Producer and Creative Director of The Nasiona, and has been nominated for Best of the Net, The Best Small Fictions and The Pushcart Prize. Her collection AT SEA was shortlisted for the 2019 Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize. @Maelllstrom/www.amartine.com.

ISBN: 9781944866914