A review of Water Lessons by Lisa Dordal

Everything we are is memory….

Lisa Dordal’s newest poetry collection, Water Lessons, is a haunting treatment of patriarchal and racist culture in which the poet is at times a victim and at times a perpetrator. That doesn’t sound like something I’d normally read, but I trust Dordal, and rightly so. She is one of the rare poets today with the skill, creativity, and sensitivity to create such poems as these with unpretentious finesse.

Water Lessons is presented in five parts, each...