Everything Is Water: Poems (Volume 13)

by Chelsea Krieg

Virginia Winner of The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series

Everything Is Water is an open letter to caregivers as the speaker grapples with her partner’s life-threatening illness, pregnancy and new motherhood, and marriage. Growing up on the Virginia coast, the speaker knows the water’s danger and allure—asks, what is beneath, what has control in so much open and unknown space? The speaker continues to feel this unease in everything as she navigates fear, identity, and loss. Everything is water. Everything is the surface tension created by the unknown. The collection often returns to the water and those inhabiting it, but it also looks to winged creatures, those on land, and those who are in between elements as they wrestle with their own survival. Water is an element that sustains and devours. When danger comes, we wonder when it will end. We ask how we can live with loss. Is it easier to run away? To let go? Everything Is Water leaves the reader suspended, treading water alongside the speaker as she seeks to answer these questions.

The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Virginia

74 pages, Paperback

Published March 25, 2026

About the author

Chelsea Krieg is a poet, freelance journalist, and educator in North Carolina. Her debut poetry collection, Everything is Water, won the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series (Virginia) and is forthcoming with Texas Review Press in 2026. She holds an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Terrain.org, Fairy Tale Review, New South, Gulf Coast, The Southern Poetry Anthology (Issue IX Virginia), Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Greensboro Review, Poet Lore, and Bellevue Literary Review, among others. She was runner-up for Hub City Press’s 2023 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize and a finalist for the New South 2021 Poetry Contest. Her work won the Ninth Annual Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Competition Award in 2017, and she was a Sally Buckner Emerging Writers’ Fellowship Award Finalist in 2018. She also received a North Carolina State Poetry Contest Honorable Mention in 2015.

Her freelance writing has received nominations for the APEX Award and received an American Society of Business Publication Editors Azbee Award of Excellence in 2022.

Chelsea is the Administrative Director of the MFA Program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC and lives in Durham, NC with her family.

Reviews

[Caleb Horowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each poem is delicately constructed—concise, sure of itself. These poems circle around the whirlpool of motherhood, grief, depression, and love for someone who is ill. the series of poems set in couples counseling are some of my favorites—the mingled grief, anger, and immense love the speaker feels for their partner, the weight of circumstance. The title is fitting—the poems return, as we all do, to the water. But you cannot step into the same river twice.