Nancy Botkin reviews
Water Castle
by Natalie Solmer

In Natalie Solmer’s Water Castle, the speaker is adrift as she searches for her identity in the rough waters of desire, longing, grief, and wonder. Throughout this collection she asks whether identity is grounded in place and whether that place can be easily sloughed off. The speaker yearned to move beyond her small Rust Belt city of South Bend, Indiana just as her European ancestors did; they looked westward over an ocean and conjured hope. Is it better to forget or remember?  In “Water Castle No. 2” when she and her sister announce they want to visit the Old Country, their grandfather asks “Why in the hell would you wanna do that?/ Don’t go.” In this poem, we see the both the burden of place and the strong aversion to erasing one’s ancestry.

The instinct to flee and forget the past in not a new one. Solmer’s strength as a writer is her use of water as an archetype to explore the gnawing persistence of place, family, and identity. She is literally surrounded by water—the big lake north of her, the St. Joe River that runs through her town, and the smaller lakes she dipped in and out of as a rebellious teen.  She shows us the waters in which we are birthed, waters we cross into the past, waters that erase, cleanse, destroy, and protect. Memory has a force like water, and it comes crashing through on every page.  In “I Am a Great Lake,” she writes:

                        I am Studebaker’s brick façade, old
                        as a summer evening

 
                        Smirnov in a 7-11 Slurpee,
my sandal thrown out the van’s window

as we drove to the forbidden beach
up the highway to the Great Lake.

Studebaker, known for its slow erosion and tarnished identity, is gone. It nevertheless remains a permanent fixture in South Bend’s collective memory.  In this poem, her love/hate relationship with the past, with ancestry, is heightened. “Confused by what’s been erased, I erase more,” she says in “Water Castle No. 3,” a poem in which she hopes her children will not inherit her Slavic features, but rather her lover’s “island culture.”  What’s finally left is the self with its attendant complexities and mysteries and the castles that can be constructed and made into home. “I saw you only by your gold,” she says of her boys’ father, the man who alleviated her destructive tendencies which, logically, she “fed [. . .] to the sea.” Water Castle contains inspiring poems, and it’s a luminous first collection.

Nancy Botkin's The Honeycomb was selected by Steel Toe Books as their 2022 Chapbook Prize winner. Her full-length collection, The Next Infinity, was published by Broadstone Books in 2019. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and magazines. She is an editor at Wolfson Press, and she lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Natalie Solmer is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Indianapolis Review and is an Assistant Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College. Her poetry has been published in numerous publications such as: Colorado Review, North American Review, The Literary Review, and Pleiades.