This is a work of the slow, dark magic language can be when a writer lets words fall—in fragments or spiraling syntax—down into the wet loam of memory and presence, down into the susceptible body. Jaramillo’s example and invitation is to add to this substrate our vomited sovereignty. That’s how we’ll join the constellations of these sequences, themselves part of “the world’s intelligence in excess of the instruments.” So distributed, reader, we could destroy the systems of shallow feeling and fast value so this book may be more than our dearly-held secret. Let’s.
— Farid Matuk

 

Laura Jaramillo’s Making Water unpacks a lovely liquid landscape shot through with the promise of violence. How can you know anything in a world of permeable boundaries, where even time moves like water, or is it blood? How can you know anything where “we are dislocations / incidentally cut / with experience?” Where you become aware of something only as it & you become something else that disappears? In Making Water, Jaramillo shows all this becoming demands an ethics. For instance, you have to be against border enforcement. The going is hard, but when it’s also beautiful, “[l]ight scatters through the canopy as a disco ball throws light.”
— Wendy Trevino

Laura Jaramillo is a poet and critic from Queens, New York living in Durham, North Carolina. Her previous books include Material Girl (subpress). She holds a PhD in critical theory from Duke University. She co-runs the North Carolina-based reading and performance series Paradiso.