One of the chapbook’s highlights, “Migration,” carries the reader from that longing and exploration into the collection’s final quiet moments. Then, in the collection’s titular poem, she longs for exile, for the moon (“What better home / for her lonely body than another lonely, / celestial body?”) I survive” in the image of an angler fish. Through the three parts of “Diver Walks into the Sea and Stays,” the speaker finally creates a narrative for herself, slowly “learn to clear ears,” and then beginning to explore, finding “everything worthy of devotion.” She concludes, “I need / nothing. But maybe painting such a clear portrait of each of them is enough. The narrative of her father is clearer than that of the mother, perhaps. In the next poem, however, the speaker reconsiders, noting that “he has learned to fly,” thoughtfully providing her two pears for travel they have the “sharp crunch of water” and nourish her more fully, while being more acceptable on a plane than liquids. In later poems, the speaker’s father appears to be the opposite, somehow: struggling to find the right way to nourish those in his care, misfeeding parakeets who don’t know to “keep their bellies full” like chickens do-an apparent metaphor for himself. She uses the metaphor of pelicans filling their mouths with fish, accepting that “our way of being in the world / was the only one we wanted,” knowing that “we had no dreams.” The reader can’t help but think of the collection’s title, however, and the speaker’s insistence on dreaming, even if it’s almost apologetic. Later, in “Before Desire,” the speaker makes this conflict a bit clearer.

More crucially, she believes that “the system / can’t need us to be superhuman” as she watches “the ways we still overflow / with hunger, so much hunger / with nowhere to go.” It doesn’t feel quite like a judgment on the mother, but perhaps a rejection of that model for herself after witnessing the wear on her bones. In the next poem, “Garbage Boogie,” the speaker notes that she has “trash guilt” and will “discard what can’t carry”-a stark contrast. What power do we have, or do we not have, to choose to linger in the lives of others? To sustain our loved ones in whatever way they may need? Love is intertwined in what is consumed, as when the speaker notes the mother “eats what we won’t,” despite her complaint that “ no one wants to be garbage.” Later, the mother wishes, “ If someone loved me more, / maybe I wouldn’t gain weight.”įinding a connection between the mystic ocean themes and the more mundane question of nourishment, Niu draws a sketch of a dead whale’s remains becoming an “ecosystem,” contradicting her mother’s wish not to “become food”-illustrating a fear that love means being consumed. These more potent metaphors reappear throughout the poems. “She is always in motion, urgent for something / she cannot name.”īoth qualities of the relationship become more apparent in “Midden / Appetite,” the first of many poems that center less around water and more around themes of food and, more significantly, “trash” or “garbage,” as the mother identifies herself. “Her relief that I can conjure, / even in sleep, what she cannot give me-good rest, / good luck, an ocean to dream in.” This care, as well as the discomfort of it at times, is evident throughout the chapbook, with the speaker frequently drawn in and away from the mother’s gravity.

“Water Dreams” pulls the central mother-daughter connection in and out of focus, like a tide. The first two poems of the collection (following a mythic sort of prologue) immediately set up some essential themes, with the motif of water carrying particular weight. No answer to that question could be straightforward, and Niu’s thoughtful exploration of it ensures its emotional dimensions remain intact. She searches for some balance between nourishing other people and relationships, and self-preservation. Stephanie Niu’s chapbook, She Has Dreamt Again of Water (Diode Editions, 2022), conjures both a dreamer’s perspective and longing for freedom, as well as a clear-eyed understanding of how it can be restricted.

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