Language Like Water by Nancy Gerber
Finishing Line Press
Release date: 11/22/24, softcover, $17.99
Language Like Water is a moving, deeply personal glimpse into the layered, often tumultuous relationship between a mother and daughter. It can’t only be roses with something that goes so deep—many of our familial roots go into muddy messes. Or in Nancy Gerber’s case “before argument tore us apart.” The complexity of this bond is explored through sharp, evocative imagery that digs deep into the emotional terrain of love, guilt, memory, and loss.
In each line of this chapbook, there’s a sense that Gerber’s words themselves carry weight far beyond their surface meanings. Her structure is as thought-provoking as its themes. Gerber's line breaks are deliberate, often allowing a full thought to hover before driving it home with a short, piercing conclusion.
Gerber seamlessly intertwines memories of innocence—ballet classes, childhood moments—with her mother’s fits of sadness and anger, painting a complex picture of love blemished by emotional turbulence. Her mother's decline into dementia looms heavy, and the guilt that accompanies such a devastating illness is captured in lines that feel both painfully raw and tender. In one particularly haunting poem, “A Good Daughter,” Gerber wrestles with the agonizing decision to place her mother in an assisted-care facility, confessing, “If I were good / I wouldn’t have put you / in a nursing home.”
Through sensory-rich descriptions, Gerber brings her mother to life in a way that feels both authentic and ephemeral. We witness her mother over the years, from the early days of grieving in a closet to “before / her memory / failed forever.” Even after her mother's death, the scent of her perfume lingers—an indelible presence that Gerber seemingly can’t shake leaving in memorialized in print.
This collection taps into so many senses, which trigger endless emotions in an already charged topic of mothers and daughters, where forgiveness doesn’t come easily once the damage has been weaved in our DNA, directly or passed down. Read to see if Nancy Gerber finds the connection most of us daughters long for.
