ANC016: How to Swim by Heather Momyer
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Eventually, this father baby ghost of someone I once knew pressed his head forth from my chest. He pushed through the canal of my neck until he found the spot where my spine opened up and there was a whole new place for him to occupy. Soon, those ghostly thoughts and memories that he carried with him sat in among my own.
Less a guide in aquatic fluency, more ruminations on the fluidity of time and the ebb and flow of memory, Heather Momyer’s How to Swim is a collection coursing through histories of love and fantasies of normal life. Her poetic prose cradles characters struggling by land, sea, and air to affirm identities while attempting safe passage to the ever elusive home. Copilots dangle on the edge of intuitive ether and mortal romance. A neologistic dragon dreams of tattoos, bondage, itself. Sister mermaids of a fractured tale lament the ones that got away. How to Swim sources stories and legends familiar to us all, but nothing is more familiar than the anxiety and exhilaration it sources from falling free. |
