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, A¯cha 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 A¯cha 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
"A¯cha 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. A¯cha 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. A¯cha 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
Industry Reviews
"To set adrift in the symphony of Aicha 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 "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. Aicha 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
"Aicha 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
