If water breathes

If water breathes follows a spiritual seeker through and across Buddhist, Hindu, Greco-Roman, Muslim, Judaic, astrophysical, and Christian cosmologies. In these poems, each moment is ripe with the future it heralds, and the poet lives as witness to the movement of time through love, loss, and longing. Desire remembers, constellates today, and foreshadows tomorrow, while both nature and the word gesture toward a salutary beyond.


""One. Two. Breathe. All the words matter in Monika Lee's marvelous If water breathes. Marvel at her marvels: Clockless air. Souwesto's sky being scanned. Jaipur becomes a bicycle. Bagpipes outstripping barbequing. Breathe in. Read her poems out loud and hear your voice in hers. Find your way to the angel words at the end. Breathe out and work your way back to the blackbird-poet at the start. Two. One. Breathe.""
--James Stewart Reaney, author, London, Canada

""If water breathes is a delight for the senses. Lyrical, rhythmic, often subtly rhymed, Monika Lee's poems ripple in the ear, refreshing amid the aural flatness of a lot of contemporary free verse. Her images are vividly spare, 'like a flurry of light' letting the space between the words blossom with meaning, proof that indeed less can mean more. These are poems well worth reading and rereading for the pleasures of each moment.""
--Susan Ioannou, poet

""What I like best about these poems is their music, sometimes ornate, sometimes delicate, sometimes simple, yet always luminous with internal rhyme. . . . They have the individual quality of a series of music box tunes that delight in their variety and in their exquisite display. The imagery at times like a shaken snow globe, or at times like a landscape viewed through a kaleidoscope, the resulting reader experience being an agitated renewal of the familiar or an exotic view of something new.""
John B. Lee, poet laureate

Monika Hope Lee is an English professor at Brescia University College in London, Ontario. She is the author of Gravity Loves the Body: Poems by Monika Lee (2008); Skin to Skin (with Shelly Harder, 2016); Slender Threads (2004); a play called The Petting Zoo; the libretto of an opera called The Maker; Shelley's Impact on Rousseau: Figuring the Written Self (1999); and dozens of peer-reviewed essays on British Romanticism. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies worldwide.