debut poetry book

Water in Every Room embodies the fluctuations of emotion and form in new motherhood. Ferocious and tender, tending and transformed, mother embraces both her child and the dualities of self in this collection of poems.

You better be sitting down when you read Heather Brown Barrett’s Water in Every Room because these poems will knock you off your feet—the imaginative and emotive energy crackles on every page as she writes about her metamorphosis into motherhood and the son she loves from bottomless depths. “Oh come / be our child, wind of change,” Barrett cries in “Blue Moon,” a resounding “Yes” to the stirring inside that will bloom her son and the water trail of poems that follow in myriad forms and styles such as haibun and ekphrasis. In “Growing a Mother” she writes, “Tender words shook my bones / loose, rattled like seeds / in a coffee tin,” and they will shake you too in words that, like a “churning ocean in our chests,” let us recognize our human capacity for sacrifice and transformation.

—Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Arkansas Poet Laureate and author of The Perfume of Pain and Flying Yellow: New and Selected Poems

Honest and heartfelt, Water in Every Room beautifully captures the dueling tensions of motherhood—the overwhelming love and frustration, the sense of purpose coupled with helplessness and extreme exhaustion. Heather Brown Barrett expertly oscillates between quiet but joyful observations of parenting and the torrent of raw emotions that accompany the shift into her new role as a mother. This collection is a deeply resonant and perfectly rendered portrait of the mother-child relationship and a necessary reminder that, like the child, the mother is a burgeoning self who requires nourishment and gentle care to grow.

—Claire Taylor, author of One Good Thing and Mother Nature, and publisher/editor-in-chief of Little Thoughts Press

In this stunning debut collection by poet Heather Brown Barrett, we are confronted with the fierceness of motherhood in the face of distress and joy. Water in Every Room creates metaphors for the everyday of family life that explore time, doubt, and the yearning for wholeness through the lens of nature and what it means to be human.

—Michael Jon Khandelwal, Executive Director of The Muse Writers Center (Norfolk, VA)