Review by Nicelle Davis
Beyond Survival: Nadia Alexis’s Testament to Love, Memory, and Reclamation
Beyond the Watershed by Nadia Alexis is not just a collection of poetry and photography—it is a haunting echo of lineage, an unflinching dialogue between a Haitian American daughter and her Haitian immigrant mother. Alexis does not merely document; she conjures. She does not simply describe; she immerses. Every image, every line, pulses with the weight of inheritance, with the tension between pain and resilience. This is poetry that does not just speak of survival—it embodies it.
In “Portraits,” Alexis captures love not as a pristine ideal but as a shifting, unpredictable force, shaped as much by absence as by presence. Forgetting a father’s birthday, resisting an impulse to reach out, avoiding a childhood home—these seemingly small betrayals become proof that love is not defined by perfection but by persistence. Love lives in the spaces between what is done and what is left undone, in the quiet ache of indecision. One moment, the speaker lingers on a forgotten birthday, wondering whether words—belated, inadequate—can mend what silence has frayed:
It’s the day after Daddy’s birthday & you realize
you forgot. He’s walking through the hallway &
you’re lying in the dip of your bed editing
a poem. You think of whether or not you should
apologize & say happy birthday.
Here, Alexis asks us: is poetry an act of repair, or merely a record of rupture? Can language carry the weight of all we mean to say but don’t? Love in these poems is raw, tangled in contradiction, less a grand declaration than a series of quiet reckonings.
In “Lament,” Alexis does what poets must often do—turn the unbearable into something that can be spoken. The poem opens with an image of violence so delicate in its phrasing that it startles: “he snatched the dove / between my legs.” A body, desecrated. A metaphor, ruptured. The brutality is in the act, but also in the aftermath—the years of carrying an unspeakable weight, the way trauma seeps into the foundation of love, turning it into something unstable. Later, the speaker describes love as a force not of comfort but of destruction:
“love with him meant being / a town without levees sinking in floodwater.”
Here, love is not a shelter—it is a storm. Alexis does not offer easy catharsis; she gives us the truth in all its ruinous beauty.
And yet, even as Alexis wades through sorrow, Beyond the Watershed does not leave us stranded. This collection is, at its core, about transformation. Through repeated invocations of Èzili Dantò—the fierce protector, the Vodou spirit of resilience and maternal power—Alexis stitches together a lineage of survival. The poems do not merely remember; they reclaim.
“Do the enslaved not / long to be free?” the speaker asks, collapsing personal and ancestral histories into a single breath. Later:
“Who among you have begged for light to stay / at your doorstep?”
These lines are not just questions; they are prayers. Alexis reaches through time, through language, and through pain, grasping toward something like hope.
Beyond the Watershed is more than a book—it is a passage, a ritual, an unbroken thread of survival. Alexis writes with an urgency that refuses erasure, crafting a collection that does not simply recount experiences but inhabits them. This is poetry that carries the weight of generations, a testament to memory, to love, to the unrelenting force of reclamation. Through Alexis’s words, we are reminded that survival is not just endurance—it is an act of defiance, of creation, of becoming.
Beyond the Watershed by Nadia Alexis
CavanKerry Press – March 2025
Trade pape, 100 pp $18
ISBN: 978-1-960327-09-3
Emerging Voices in Poetry
Nicelle Davis is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist. Her poetry collections include The Language of Fractions (Moon Tide Press 2023). The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press, 2016), In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Becoming Judas (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Circe (Lowbrow Press, 2011). Penguin Noir recently won the Changing Light Novel in Verse Prize from Livingston Press and will be released Summer of 2025.