For Want of Water: and other poems

by Sasha Pimentel, Gregory Pardlo (Foreword)

Searing verses set on the Mexican border about war and addiction, love and sexual violence, grief and loss, from an American Book Award–winning author.  Selected by Gregory Pardlo as winner of the National Poetry Series.
 
El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States, while across the river, Ciudad Juárez suffers a history of femicides and a horrific drug war. Witnessing this, a Filipina’s life unravels as she tries to love an addict, the murders growing just a city—but the breadth of a country—away. This collection weaves the personal with recent history, the domestic with the tragic, asking how much “a body will hold,” reaching from the border to the poet’s own Philippines. These poems thirst in the desert, want for water, searching the brutal and tender territories between bodies, families, and nations.

Genres: Poetry

146 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 17, 2017

About the author

Born in Manila and raised in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Sasha Pimentel is a Filipina poet and author of For Want of Water (Beacon Press, 2017), selected by Gregory Pardlo as a winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series, and Insides She Swallowed (West End Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 American Book Award. A finalist for the 2015 Rome Prize in Literature (American Academy of Arts and Letters), her work has been published in New York Times Magazine, Poets & Writers, American Poetry Review, Guernica and New England Review, among others.

Winner of the 2015 University of Texas System’s Board of Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, Sasha teaches contemporary American poetry, poetry writing and creative nonfiction writing, with research foci on Asian American, Black, Jewish American, and Latin American poetics at the University of Texas at El Paso. She's an Associate Professor in a bilingual (Spanish-English) MFA Program to writers from across the Americas in the Department of Creative Writing, and serves as affiliated faculty in the Chican@ Studies Program.

Sasha holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno.

She lives in El Paso, Texas with her husband, the historian Michael Topp, on the border of Ciudad Juárez, México.

Reviews

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pimentel's poems are searingly evocative, emotive, bleak, dark, and packed to the brim with violence and heartbreak. There is a sensual feel to the whole, too; she weaves together so many themes and emotions in rather a masterful way. For Want of Water almost bubbles over with its grief, and is immensely powerful in consequence.

[Isa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovely writing, and difficult to read. I have plans to revisit when my brain is a bit more in the groove! (In the groove?)

[Natasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of 50+ poems are certainly a moving and at times harrowing account of the lives affected in the dangerous areas threatened by drugs and crimes. Some of the poems are more like short notes and some are similar to the Japanese haiku. But all resonates the deep suffering the writers have gone through. Highly recommended to fans of literature!

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this collection, although I think I definitely need to reread it to absorb the language and flow better. There was a lot of ache and sorrow in these ones, and I thought Pimentel did well putting emotion into words. Overall a solid book.

[Shamiram · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Each time I enter a memory, it changes with my entrance.”

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got to meet Sasha where I was working as staff and she was faculty. She gave a wonderfully engaging presentation about language, concluding with readings from her work. I didn’t get to interact with her very much. I was intimidated and found myself reading her reactions to the things I had to say about poetry derisively (which she would be totally entitled to do, considering my lack of knowledge) so I found myself making excuses. She came off as so fiercely intelligent and also incredibly staunch in her opinions.

After reading this collection, I have to say I think I was right to read her demeanor that way. Many people in the reviews I’ve read have used the word evocative, but in very different ways. I think this is because her text is constructed (literally; line breaks and stanza construction is visibly careful and intentional) so finely, her word choice so large and specific, and her way of conjuring meaning with syntax... it’s a little boggling. The text sits staunchly on the page and doesn’t give itself away. It also doesn’t reach out for you and beacon you in like other writers who have earned that “evocative” adjective. Her work means, it means specifically, and it does not beg to be interpreted, but rather to be read and understood. I may be way off here, but that’s the feeling I got. A repeat reading is in order.

I appreciated the notes at the end. Just another sort of virtuosic flourish where she shows her polygoltal, bibliophilic wiles. The way her work incorporates other art like little shards of mirror and glass to reflect and refract meaning is lovely, if obtuse to those who haven’t read Archimedes to Stein or lived from the Philippines to south Texas.

I liked this. I don’t know exactly what my reaction would have been had I not met and liked Sasha, or seen her fiery and inspiring presentation. But perhaps that’s a better way to experience writing anyway.

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

The only poem that really stands out in my memory is the title poem. Pimentel's phrasing can be very fussy and opaque. And this is a personal opinion, but I don't feel like your notes section should include quite so many "stolen" lines. I'm reading your book to hear your lines, not someone else's (this is totally different from referencing something that isn't an actual quotation). I always hate when I'm reading a book of poetry and fall in love with a line, only to read in the notes that it wasn't the poet's line at all. Anyway, this collection is definitely not for a casual poetry fan.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though there are Pimentel's lyrical, imagistic voice is crystallized brilliantly in a few these poems, in the rest it doesn't quite all come together. Her idiosyncratic diction can be cumbersome at times, and her metaphors are often frustratingly opaque. That being said, even the poems that didn't quite work for me were still interesting.

[Megan Mellino · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't *love* this collection. It felt a little too inaccessible. The language was a little too academic and the way the author chose to break up stanzas mid-sentence drove me a little nuts. I did like several poems, however, so I'm giving it a 3.75, rounded up to a 4. My favorite poem from this book was "Moment in Storm".

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found these poems hard to digest because of the intense mix of vocabulary, subject matter, and lengthiness. However, overall, I believe it was worth the read. The speaker’s pain is often palpable, and the imagery is fresh and thought-provoking. CW: graphic depictions of sexual abuse of a child, death, and violence in general

[mad mags · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pimentel's writing is lovely, but I'm afraid that most of the imagery and meaning went right over my head. Definitely didn't help my self-confidence when it comes to "getting" poetry.

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through Edelweiss.)

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

5 stars for the border poems about Ciudad Juárez, and the ones about her mother and father, but the poems she wrote about getting divorced and getting married to a guy who is also getting divorced are some of the most solipsistic and tone-deaf poems I have read in quite some time.

[Mauzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was beautifully written, and very evocative. I'm generally not a poetry person, but I did enjoy this.

[Lindsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be honest, none of the poems in this collection really grabbed me. There were one or two that had powerful lines but overall I didn't find the same connection or emotion that the other reviewers found. I just wasn't that moved.

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.