Join us for the release of Lynda V. E. Crawford's Washing Water!

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Limited copies available for purchase at event.

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About Washing Water:

Washing Water is a poetry collection that lilts life through the eyes of Caribbean girls and women across the African diaspora. The poems weave vignettes of ancestor-women, known and unknown, who have lived the fat belly of life and understand its joys and imperfections. The poems in Washing Water entwine stories, lived and dreamed, from little girl into womanhood—stories that hold hands with ancestors and progeny to talk together of rain and wash water.

About Lynda V. E. Crawford:

Lynda V. E. Crawford was born and raised in Barbados and lives in the United States. Both homes sway and punctuate her writing. Crawford writes to sneak behind eyes, blow through ears, and stretch voices. She's been a journalist, copywriter, website manager, and email marketer. Poetry won’t let go. Her work has appeared in national and international print and online journals and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, ArtsEtc Barbados, The Caribbean Writer, The Galway Review, The Bookends Review, California Quarterly, Exposition Review, Spectrum Publishing, Moonstone Arts Center (anthologies various), Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Poets Society Los Angeles Poets for Justice: A Document for the People Anthology in honor of George Floyd, and Haikuniverse. Her poem "Ballet Is Never Enough" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Nina Riggs Poetry Award. Crawford is a graduate of The University of Connecticut (Bachelors) and Long Island University (United Nations Graduate Certificate) (Masters).

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Praise for Washing Water:

Lynda V. E. Crawford’s Washing Water is a lyrical tour-de-force. At once a postcolonial critique, an immigration narrative, a family history, and a meditation on coming of age, Washing Water wrestles with slavery, racism, sexual vulnerability and personal anguish. Yet in Crawford’s telling, intense communal vigilance and care binds generations together in a watchful embrace: ‘I tap into my mother / and she into hers / and she into hers / and on. . . . ’ In the face of her newborn grandchild a woman sees ‘three relatives / four ancestors . . . loving duppies sitting together.’ Those duppies (ghosts, but more than that), haunt an old sugar plantation, a ‘reminder’ to its current owner of his inheritance and responsibility. Within this protective conjuration, mothers ‘laugh with teeth and tongue . . . talk of rain while washing water’ and a girl can grow up ‘waiting for the sun to say, child / watch me dance in your clouds.’ With this debut, Crawford establishes herself as a poet of exceptional powers.
— Tom Laichas, author of Three Hundred Streets of Venice California

Washing Water is renewal, mystery, ritual, question: how do you wash an element that renews itself? Is it a dance, a metaphor, a passing of time? It’s woman as thunder, as god, as fear and awe of her own god within–girl entering the world knowing the name she has always known. It is an offering to ‘African women-ancestors across the diaspora of the Caribbean and Americas, known and unknown.’ The voices renew themselves through time: ‘I would sit / with my women and girls . . . / as they give me all / I need to know—and write.’ Lynda V. E. Crawford creates documentary forms, as in, ‘Drax Hall Duppies,’ which hold history accountable. We receive these accounts as haunting, as record: ‘This is the story my severed hand in the mill / clawed to write.’ The unfolding of history also enfolds: ‘see how her small arms / enfold the sky’s birth water.’ In receiving, we transcend.
— Cynthia Alessandra Briano, Lecturer, California State University Fullerton African American Studies and Founder of Love On Demand Global

Washing Water is full-to-bursting with language that shimmies on the page while reveling in a porous world: ‘it’s an Earth thing’, one where fore-mothers, and ‘mothers who laugh with teeth and tongue’, and great-grands tap into each other. This linguistically inventive debut from Lynda V. E. Crawford offers up ‘such skill as you shift joy to your weak side’ and the reassurance that ‘Come eventide, a new nimble will settle in.’ Marvel at the largesse that she brings to the lowliest: ‘two raw macaroni people / with wool hair, lovingly checked / each December for weevils.’ Lynda V. E. Crawford has crafted poems whose generosity of spirit are infectious, deliriously so.
— Beth Ruscio, author of Speaking Parts, Brick Road Poetry Prize winner

Washing Water is an amazing journey to the Caribbean. Full sights and sounds of the islands — childhood adventures, practices and habits young women, mothers and grandmothers — all in the richest of language, taking us home to a place we’ve never been before. And, yes, when I read the collection, the voice in my head was Lynda’s, in all its richness.
— Karen Scott, poet