“Alice Anderson’s stunning memoir begins with cathedrals made of our scars. In this time of fear and doubt, of seemingly perpetual midnight, this book rises to sacredness in its heroic honesty, its warrior’s heart, and its profound beauty.”

“I love this book with my entire body. Alice Anderson’s Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away is nothing short of a body and soul retrieval. Fearlessly diving down into the heat and mythos of Mississippi, she unflinchingly tells the truth about what happens when the one you love tries to kill you and your child. I am astonished at how this fiercely beautiful song can arise from such wreckage of violence and lies. In page after riveting page, we’re reminded how mothers love their children with ferociousness, and how that love might take shape in the child who saves her life. Maybe, by refusing to surrender our bodies, we are always saving our own lives. Maybe our songs are worth fighting for. Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away is that necessary song.”

“Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away is as stark as it is beautiful, a hard-won life so full of sorrow and joy that it runs down the great rain chain of heaven, singing like a choir of determined angels. It broke my heart wide open and out fell all this thunder and lightning and beautiful star stuff and rusty silver, torn silk, and the old diary we carry around in our bodies. Quite possibly the best memoir I’ve ever read.”

“Like blowtorching through silk, Alice Anderson’s alchemy is to turn the shattering pain of her life into poetry. Heartbreaking, terrifying, and shattering, Anderson’s powerful fight for her kids and her own safety becomes a story of breathtaking redemption and yes, beauty.”

“You should prepare to read The Watermark the way you prepare for a storm. Stock up on essentials. Make sure you have enough food and water to hunker down. You won’t be going anywhere for a while. A magnificent, awe-inspiring force is coming to claim every scrap of your attention until it’s done with you. That force is Alice Anderson’s poetry. Meeting us at “the intersection of our wounds and our wanting,” Anderson tells us the most essential stories about what it means to be human—about our woes and hurts and victories and dreams—about how we must “find grace within / the calamity—” because “that’s where all / the beauty / lives.” The Watermark isn’t just a book. It’s Anderson’s life force rent from her chest and handed to you still beating. It’s the “the word, etched into every / drenched surface.” It’s a hurricane ripping through the villages of your heart and leaving them littered with grace.”

“Welcome to the “terrible swirling fais do-do” of Alice Anderson’s The Watermark. Set in gulf coast Mississippi and a New Orleans of “atonement and brioche,” the collection is aptly framed by Katrina, for in this brave, inventive female picaresque, poem after poem seethes like a hurricane, an orgasm, and a resurrection. It is her capacity for naming and owning the details that keeps this girl from drowning: the many-titted nutria, the sound of her own splintering bone whispering luck, a sweater bought to match her bruises, “swamp water and alligator and every/slow-growing thing.” Somehow, having met with every manner of violence and violation, wearing her ravaged dress and fancy cotton underthings, this majestic girl-Ishmael has escaped alone to tell thee.”

“Reading Alice Anderson’s The Watermark is like reading a novel you can’t put down, is like reading a story whose plot keeps shifting out of the boundaries of narrative, is like traveling in time to horrors committed in entrancing moonlight, is like “shirtless days as a child where you /climbed trees and ran in the woods and /didn’t know yet what gender was,” is like surviving the storm, is like the storm, is like violence, is like redemption from violence, is like new epistemologies revealed in catalogues of similes, is like the voice of love that survives, is like the watermark imprinting love and beauty, is love—the ultimate beauty—rising above the watermark.”

“Beware all those who enter here. Anderson’s remarkable first book...is like an outcropping of hell—the reader is compelled by fascination and horror to keep reading...Anderson’s life force is implicit in the language throughout these poems, objective, exact, charged with an emotional force given only to those who have been to hell and returned to tell the tale.”

“This book knocked me flat. In a good way. The writing is exquisite. Alice Anderson’s honesty will take your breath away. She has the courage to tell her heart’s deepest, darkest truths while never compromising on the poet’s craft. Anderson’s poems are rigorous and right. They could be about trees and you’d swoon. But they aren’t about trees. They are about a woman and her body and her life and the little girl who lives inside of her still. They are fiercely about one person and also about us all. I opened this book and didn’t close it until I read every last poem, straight through. Human Nature is an amazing book.”