AQUATICA / THE DIARIES / FRAGMENTS, by Anna Drzewiecki

Poetry, chapbook, 44 pages, from Bottlecap Features. AQUATICA / THE DIARIES / FRAGMENTS assembles scraps, lists, remains—fragments—from a voice/persona/spirit ‘Aquatica.’ A partial study. Like montage, fragments appear in relation but not always touching as Aquatica bears witness to a new ‘life on land’ and its knot of relationships made strange. ‘Where am I and how did I get here?’ ‘What will a living take?’ Aquatica is a siren and not-a-siren; a messy diarist; a newcomer and a depth; a scribe and a scribbler; reluctant and responsive; sick and sane; buoyant and sunken; near and far; mollusk and murk; interior and ulterior; an organism and an essence. Aquatica summons and collapses her own arenas for surfacing. In her account, bodies are sharp and shifting, ‘unreliable.’ Aquatica searches and side-eyes language as she quests for voice. In these witness fragments, so-called Aquatica leaves traces of her obsessions, frustrations, alchemies, and exhaustions. *** Written during a period of illness while working on commercial sea farms. *** Anna Drzewiecki is a ‘sick’ poet living in Maine. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. She works outdoors in food, wellness, and hospitality and teaches English at a community college. Their writing appears in FENCE, Przekroj, antiphony, and elsewhere. Website: wrack.zone