The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water by Cameron Barnett (review)

Anyone who spends enough time around books eventually gets told not to judge one by the cover, but the title is another story. A great title can be the dividing line between whether a book is bought, and often, shows the depths of care the author put into his or her work. Cameron Barnett's A Drowning Boy's Guide to Water, winner of the 2017 Rising Writer Contest, is one such book, and, though named after one poem within the collection, the title unifies every single page. Using water as a metaphor for racism, the waters rising higher at each aggression, insult, and offense, Barnett explores what it means to be African-American in a USA that is still torn between making progress toward equality and the parts of the country that have been left in a monochromatic past.

Barnett's combination of confessional poetry, nature imagery, and social criticism is evident from the first poem, "When the Mute Swans Return." Beginning with calming descriptions of "the shape of you" rippling on a lake surface, the poem leads casually to lines about how "the fledgling wind / refuses the home of your lungs," turning an inviting image into one of isolation. In the end, "the mute swans—to fly—pull at the water."

Subtlety and metaphor give way to direct statements in the following piece, "Nonbinding Legislation, or a Resolution." He writes, "I've been black so long / I don't know what pride is anymore," and how he acknowledges he is an individual, but also a symbol, bearing representation even if he resists representing. This poem also addresses the way race is used in larger social situations, reading, "the race card is now everyone's card / in a deck I did not cut," quickly followed by, "I hate when white people / hate white people because hating white people / is fashionable. A person's color is a silly thing to hate." The political motivations behind race narratives aren't lost here, either, as he then adds, "hate is a strong word / working out on every tongue red enough / to spew it or blue enough to covet it."

Some pieces don't confront race, or at least, not as directly. "Stack" is about a narrator making a pile of firewood with his father, putting logs "bark-side down. This keeps them / from soaking in too much water. …Spaces must be left in the stacking for the wood to breathe." The narrator pulls a tarp tight around the pile, his clothes soaked in mud, and the father remarks making this pile is "a matter of keeping in / as much as a matter of keeping out." When finished, "he kicks it, so we both know it's solid."

"Stepping into your Mouth," a piece written for Yusef Komunyakaa, remains flush with Barnett's imagery. He opens with, "The front door of anything is always a trap," so he opts to enter the house through a cellar door, feeling instead like he's "stepping into your mouth." Other parts of the house become Komunyakaa's body as the narrator guides readers through, pausing at a vase full of seeds from a tree in Vietnam that saved his life. "I put one seed in my pocket and tell myself / every adventure needs an amulet."

Another dedicated poem, left simply as for A, approaches a different, but still serious, social issue. "Oceans Are the Smallest Things" tells of the difficulties the narrator faced alongside other people, even when not facing any himself. He "could hustle the basketball / court, scraping up my hands… but I couldn't keep my friend from cutting herself / when no one was watching." They attend class together, and though she hides her wounds, the narrator can't stand learning from books when "what I really needed to know was how / to make a hug hurt less, or what to say on AIM / when A told me she was raped by someone she knew, / started to tell me by saying: Cam, I think I did a...